ArticlePLoS genetics2010
Evidence for pervasive adaptive protein evolution in wild mice.
Article in PLoS genetics, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 75 papers.
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Who cites it
75 citing papers in PubMed, 145 citations in OpenAlex.
- Gene-level complexity explains genome-wide variation in the distribution of fitness effects.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
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- The effectiveness of selection in a species affects the direction of amino acid frequency evolution.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Phenogenomic resources immortalized in a panel of wild-derived strains of five species of house mice.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Purifying Selection Influences the Comparison of Heterozygosities between Populations.Biology · 2024Article
- African Suid Genomes Provide Insights into the Local Adaptation to Diverse African Environments.Molecular biology and evolution · 2022Article
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- Insights into Mus musculus Population Structure across Eurasia Revealed by Whole-Genome Analysis.Genome biology and evolution · 2022Article
- Two decades of suspect evidence for adaptive molecular evolution-negative selection confounding positive-selection signals.National science review · 2022Article
- Globally Relaxed Selection and Local Adaptation in Boechera stricta.Genome biology and evolution · 2022Article
- Changing Population Size in McDonald-Kreitman Style Analyses: Artifactual Correlations and Adaptive Evolution between Humans and Chimpanzees.Genome biology and evolution · 2022Article
- Genetic diversity estimates for themicroPublication biology · 2022Article
- Population genomics of invasive rodents on islands: Genetic consequences of colonization and prospects for localized synthetic gene drive.Evolutionary applications · 2021Article
- Greater strength of selection and higher proportion of beneficial amino acid changing mutations in humans compared with mice andGenome research · 2021Article
- Genomic Landscape of Mutational Biases in the Pacific Oyster Crassostrea gigas.Genome biology and evolution · 2020Article
- Further resolution of the house mouse (Mus musculus) phylogeny by integration over isolation-with-migration histories.BMC evolutionary biology · 2020Article
- Longevity and the drift barrier: Bridging the gap between Medawar and Hamilton.Evolution letters · 2020Article
- Population Genomics of the House Mouse and the Brown Rat.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2020Article
- Adaptive Evolution Patterns in the Pacific Oyster Crassostrea gigas.Marine biotechnology (New York, N.Y.) · 2019Article
15 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
The relative contributions of neutral and adaptive substitutions to molecular evolution has been one of the most controversial issues in evolutionary biology for more than 40 years. The analysis of within-species nucleotide polymorphism and between-species divergence data supports a widespread role for adaptive protein evolution in certain taxa. For example, estimates of the proportion of adaptive amino acid substitutions (alpha) are 50% or more in enteric bacteria and Drosophila. In contrast, recent estimates of alpha for hominids have been at most 13%. Here, we estimate alpha for protein sequences of murid rodents based on nucleotide polymorphism data from multiple genes in a population of the house mouse subspecies Mus musculus castaneus, which inhabits the ancestral range of the Mus species complex and nucleotide divergence between M. m. castaneus and M. famulus or the rat. We estimate that 57% of amino acid substitutions in murids have been driven by positive selection. Hominids, therefore, are exceptional in having low apparent levels of adaptive protein evolution. The high frequency of adaptive amino acid substitutions in wild mice is consistent with their large effective population size, leading to effective natural selection at the molecular level. Effective natural selection also manifests itself as a paucity of effectively neutral nonsynonymous mutations in M. m. castaneus compared to humans.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.