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MBE Advance Access published online on March 9, 2005
Molecular Biology and Evolution, doi:10.1093/molbev/msi128
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© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org
Accepted March 1, 2005

Research Article

Positive and Negative Selection on Mammalian Y Chromosomes

Dave T. Gerrard 1 and Dmitry A. Filatov 1*

1 School of Biosciences, The University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Dmitry A. Filatov, E-mail: d.filatov{at}bham.ac.uk


  Abstract

Y chromosomes are genetically degenerate in most organisms studied. The loss of genes from Y chromosomes is thought to be due to the inefficiency of purifying selection in non-recombining regions, which leads to the accumulation of deleterious mutations via the processes of hitchhiking, background selection and Muller's ratchet. As the severity of these processes depends on the number of functional genes linked together on the non-recombining Y, it is not clear whether these processes are still at work on the old, gene poor mammalian Y chromosomes. If purifying selection is indeed less efficient in the Y-linked, compared to the X-linked genes, deleterious non-synonymous substitutions are expected to accumulate faster on the Y chromosome. However, positive selection on Y-linked genes could also increase the rate of amino acid changing substitutions. Thus, the previous reports of an elevated non-synonymous substitution rate in Y-linked genes are still open to interpretation. Here we report evidence for positive selection in two out of three studied mammalian Y-linked genes, suggesting that adaptive Darwinian evolution may be common on mammalian Y chromosomes. Taking positive selection into account we demonstrate that purifying selection is less efficient in mammalian Y-linked genes compared to their X-linked homologues, suggesting that these genes continue to degenerate.

Keywords: adaptive evolution; mammalian sex chromosomes.
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