Student Author(s)

Aslihan Dincer; Daniel Virgil; Guang Xu

Academic Program

Bioinformatics & Computational Biology

UMMS Affiliation

Program in Bioinformatics and Integrative Biology

Publication Date

2011-12-01

Document Type

Article

Disciplines

Bioinformatics | Genetics and Genomics | Life Sciences | Medicine and Health Sciences

Abstract

Identifying the genetic basis of human adaptation has remained a central focal point of modern population genetics. One major area of interest has been the use of polymorphism data to detect so-called "footprints" of selective sweeps - patterns produced as a beneficial mutation arises and rapidly fixes in the population. Based on numerous simulation studies and power analyses, the necessary sample size for achieving appreciable power has been shown to vary from a few individuals to a few dozen, depending on the test statistic. And yet, the sequencing of multiple copies of a single region, or of multiple genomes as is now often the case, incurs considerable cost. Enard et al. (2010) have recently proposed a method to identify patterns of selective sweeps using a single genome - and apply this approach to human and non-human primates (chimpanzee, orangutan, and macaque). They employ essentially a modification of the Hudson, Kreitman, and Aguade test - using heterozygous single nucleotide polymorphisms from single individuals, and divergence data from two closely related species (human-chimpanzee, human-orangutan, and human-macaque). Given the potential importance of this finding, we here investigate the properties of this statistic. We demonstrate through simulation that this approach is neither robust to demography nor background selection; nor is it robust to variable recombination rates.

Rights and Permissions

Copyright: © 2011 Sinha, Dincer, Virgil, Xu, Poh and Jensen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial License, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited.

DOI of Published Version

10.3389/fgene.2011.00085

Source

Sinha P, Dincer A, Virgil D, Xu G, Poh Y-P and Jensen JD (2011) On detecting selective sweeps using single genomes. Front. Gene. 2:85. doi: 10.3389/fgene.2011.00085. Link to article on publisher's website

Journal/Book/Conference Title

Frontiers in Genetics

Related Resources

Link to article in PubMed

PubMed ID

22303379

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