ArticleGenetics2013
Population growth inflates the per-individual number of deleterious mutations and reduces their mean effect.
Article in Genetics, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 49 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
49 citing papers in PubMed.
- Pervasive cryptic selection in the human noncoding genome.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Ancestry-specific performance of variant effect predictors in clinical variant classification.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Demographic History, Genetic Load, and the Efficacy of Selection in the Globally Invasive Mosquito Aedes aegypti.Genome biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Purging of Highly Deleterious Mutations Through an Extreme Bottleneck.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Local Adaptation Is Highest in Populations With Stable Long-Term Growth.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Mitochondrial DNA Genomes Reveal Relaxed Purifying Selection During Human Population Expansion after the Last Glacial Maximum.Molecular biology and evolution · 2024Article
- CD59 gene: 143 haplotypes of 22,718 nucleotides length by computational phasing in 113 individuals from different ethnicities.Transfusion · 2024Article
- Tests of evolutionary and genetic rescue using flour beetles,Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Heterogeneity in viral populations increases the rate of deleterious mutation accumulation.Genetics · 2022Article
- Article
- Deleterious Mutations Accumulate Faster in Allopolyploid Than Diploid Cotton (Gossypium) and Unequally between Subgenomes.Molecular biology and evolution · 2022Article
- Populations, Traits, and Their Spatial Structure in Humans.Genome biology and evolution · 2021Review
- Human molecular evolutionary rate, time dependency and transient polymorphism effects viewed through ancient and modern mitochondrial DNA genomes.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Article
- Population Size, Sex and Purifying Selection: Comparative Genomics of Two Sister Taxa of the Wild Yeast Saccharomyces paradoxus.Genome biology and evolution · 2020Article
- Evolutionary perspectives on polygenic selection, missing heritability, and GWAS.Human genetics · 2020Review
- Population genetic simulation study of power in association testing across genetic architectures and study designs.Genetic epidemiology · 2020Article
- Extensive disruption of protein interactions by genetic variants across the allele frequency spectrum in human populations.Nature communications · 2019Article
- Evolution and Genetic Diversity of theAntimicrobial agents and chemotherapy · 2019Article
- Deleterious alleles in the context of domestication, inbreeding, and selection.Evolutionary applications · 2019Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
This study addresses the question of how purifying selection operates during recent rapid population growth such as has been experienced by human populations. This is not a straightforward problem because the human population is not at equilibrium: population genetics predicts that, on the one hand, the efficacy of natural selection increases as population size increases, eliminating ever more weakly deleterious variants; on the other hand, a larger number of deleterious mutations will be introduced into the population and will be more likely to increase in their number of copies as the population grows. To understand how patterns of human genetic variation have been shaped by the interaction of natural selection and population growth, we examined the trajectories of mutations with varying selection coefficients, using computer simulations. We observed that while population growth dramatically increases the number of deleterious segregating sites in the population, it only mildly increases the number carried by each individual. Our simulations also show an increased efficacy of natural selection, reflected in a higher fraction of deleterious mutations eliminated at each generation and a more efficient elimination of the most deleterious ones. As a consequence, while each individual carries a larger number of deleterious alleles than expected in the absence of growth, the average selection coefficient of each segregating allele is less deleterious. Combined, our results suggest that the genetic risk of complex diseases in growing populations might be distributed across a larger number of more weakly deleterious rare variants.
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Registered trials
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.