ArticlePLoS genetics2008
The population genetics of dN/dS.
Article in PLoS genetics, 2008. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 562 papers.
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Who cites it
562 citing papers in PubMed.
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- From Codons to Protein Structure: Evolutionary Constraints of Mitochondrial Proteins in Corvides.Biology · 2026Article
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- Epistasis and co-adaptation in bacterial genome evolution.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2026Review
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- High-resolution melting (HRM)-based genotyping of Toxoplasma gondii in meat products: comparative evaluation of ROP18, ROP5, and B1 gene markers.World journal of microbiology & biotechnology · 2026Article
- Complete genome sequencing and evolutionary analyses of duck hepatitis a viruses in Egyptian duck farms.BMC veterinary research · 2026Article
- The heterogeneous selection landscape of genome evolution in prokaryotes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The Use of dN/dS Ratios to Investigate Types of Selection in Related Sexual and Asexual Lineages.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Review
- HIV-1 and Vaccine: Analysis of gp41 Target Sequences.Current microbiology · 2026Article
- Complete mitochondrial genome assembly and analysis of Astragalus (Papilionoideae: Fabaceae) species revealed its RNA editing and phylogenetic implications.BMC plant biology · 2026Article
- Predicting the evolutionary and structural compensation in Tat ARM region across HIV-1 groups using machine learning approach.Scientific reports · 2026Article
502 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Evolutionary pressures on proteins are often quantified by the ratio of substitution rates at non-synonymous and synonymous sites. The dN/dS ratio was originally developed for application to distantly diverged sequences, the differences among which represent substitutions that have fixed along independent lineages. Nevertheless, the dN/dS measure is often applied to sequences sampled from a single population, the differences among which represent segregating polymorphisms. Here, we study the expected dN/dS ratio for samples drawn from a single population under selection, and we find that in this context, dN/dS is relatively insensitive to the selection coefficient. Moreover, the hallmark signature of positive selection over divergent lineages, dN/dS>1, is violated within a population. For population samples, the relationship between selection and dN/dS does not follow a monotonic function, and so it may be impossible to infer selection pressures from dN/dS. These results have significant implications for the interpretation of dN/dS measurements among population-genetic samples.
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