ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2010
Detecting positive selection within genomes: the problem of biased gene conversion.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 86 papers.
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86 citing papers in PubMed.
- The performance of genetic-constraint metrics varies significantly across the human noncoding genome.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Interrogating the Regulatory Function of HAQERs during Human Cortical Development.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Evolution of GC-biased gene conversion by natural selection.Genetics · 2025Article
- Article
- Compensatory Evolution Following Deleterious Episodes of GC-biased Gene Conversion in Rodents.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Comparative Phylogenetics Reveal Clade-specific Drivers of Recombination Rate Evolution Across Vertebrates.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Molecular evolution of TRPC4 regulatory sequences supports a role in mammalian thermoregulatory adaptation.PeerJ · 2025Article
- Increased Positive Selection in Highly Recombining Genes Does not Necessarily Reflect an Evolutionary Advantage of Recombination.Molecular biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Half a Century of Controversy: The Neutralist/Selectionist Debate in Molecular Evolution.Genome biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Article
- Evolution of the Mutation Spectrum Across a Mammalian Phylogeny.Molecular biology and evolution · 2023Article
- GC-biased gene conversion drives accelerated evolution of ultraconserved elements in mammalian and avian genomes.Genome research · 2023Article
- The evolutionary maintenance of ancient recombining sex chromosomes in the ostrich.PLoS genetics · 2023Article
- "Evolution of the mutation spectrum across a mammalian phylogeny".bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Beginner's Guide on the Use of PAML to Detect Positive Selection.Molecular biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Evolution is not Uniform Along Coding Sequences.Molecular biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Positive selection-driven fixation of a hominin-specific amino acid mutation related to dephosphorylation in IRF9.BMC ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Unusual mammalian usage of TGA stop codons reveals that sequence conservation need not imply purifying selection.PLoS biology · 2022Article
- Changing Population Size in McDonald-Kreitman Style Analyses: Artifactual Correlations and Adaptive Evolution between Humans and Chimpanzees.Genome biology and evolution · 2022Article
- Factors That Affect the Rates of Adaptive and Nonadaptive Evolution at the Gene Level in Humans and Chimpanzees.Genome biology and evolution · 2022Article
26 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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7 authors.
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Abstract
The identification of loci influenced by positive selection is a major goal of evolutionary genetics. A popular approach is to perform scans of alignments on a genome-wide scale in order to find regions evolving at accelerated rates on a particular branch of a phylogenetic tree. However, positive selection is not the only process that can lead to accelerated evolution. Notably, GC-biased gene conversion (gBGC) is a recombination-associated process that results in the biased fixation of G and C nucleotides. This process can potentially generate bursts of nucleotide substitutions within hotspots of meiotic recombination. Here, we analyse the results of a scan for positive selection on genes on branches across the primate phylogeny. We show that genes identified as targets of positive selection have a significant tendency to exhibit the genomic signature of gBGC. Using a maximum-likelihood framework, we estimate that more than 20 per cent of cases of significantly elevated non-synonymous to synonymous substitution rates ratio (d(N)/d(S)), particularly in shorter branches, could be due to gBGC. We demonstrate that in some cases, gBGC can lead to very high d(N)/d(S) (more than 2). Our results indicate that gBGC significantly affects the evolution of coding sequences in primates, often leading to patterns of evolution that can be mistaken for positive selection.
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