ArticleeLife2018
Background selection and biased gene conversion affect more than 95% of the human genome and bias demographic inferences.
Article in eLife, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 88 papers.
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Who cites it
88 citing papers in PubMed.
- Allelic gene conversion softens selective sweeps.Genetics · 2026Article
- Genomic insights into natural selection in recent human history.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2026Review
- Targeted population genomics uncovers demographic history and genetic divergence in north American wild cranberry.Horticulture research · 2026Article
- Causal inference clarifies the roles of background selection and mutation rate variation in shaping human genetic diversity.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Allele Frequency Spectra as a General Tool for Modeling Genetic Diversity.Acta biotheoretica · 2026Article
- Article
- Insights into human adaptation from ancient DNA.Nature genetics · 2026Review
- UK Biobank-Based Genetic and Proteomic Network Insights into Metabolic Dysfunction-Associated Steatotic Liver Disease Pathogenesis.International journal of molecular sciences · 2026Article
- Identifying Adaptive Footprints in the Presence of Demographic Uncertainty.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Article
- ThebioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Article
- The performance of genetic-constraint metrics varies significantly across the human noncoding genome.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- The impact of non-neutral synonymous mutations when inferring selection on nonsynonymous mutations.Genetics · 2025Article
- GHIST 2024: The First Genomic History Inference Strategies Tournament.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Not by Selection Alone: Expanding the Scope of Gene-Culture Coevolution.Evolutionary anthropology · 2025Review
- Evolution of GC-biased gene conversion by natural selection.Genetics · 2025Article
- Research on the Historical Dynamics of Baicheng Oil Chicken Populations.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Assessing simulation-based supervised machine learning for demographic parameter inference from genomic data.Heredity · 2025Article
- Evolution of Functional Genomic Diversity During a Bottleneck.Genome biology and evolution · 2025Article
28 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Disentangling the effect on genomic diversity of natural selection from that of demography is notoriously difficult, but necessary to properly reconstruct the history of species. Here, we use high-quality human genomic data to show that purifying selection at linked sites (i.e. background selection, BGS) and GC-biased gene conversion (gBGC) together affect as much as 95% of the variants of our genome. We find that the magnitude and relative importance of BGS and gBGC are largely determined by variation in recombination rate and base composition. Importantly, synonymous sites and non-transcribed regions are also affected, albeit to different degrees. Their use for demographic inference can lead to strong biases. However, by conditioning on genomic regions with recombination rates above 1.5 cM/Mb and mutation types (C↔G, A↔T), we identify a set of SNPs that is mostly unaffected by BGS or gBGC, and that avoids these biases in the reconstruction of human history.
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