PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Pooja Narang
AU  - Melissa A. Wilson Sayres
TI  - Long-term natural selection affects patterns of neutral divergence on the X chromosome more than the autosomes
AID  - 10.1101/023234
DP  - 2015 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 023234
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/07/27/023234.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/07/27/023234.full
AB  - Natural selection reduces neutral population genetic diversity near coding regions of the genome because recombination has not had time to unlink selected alleles from nearby neutral regions. For ten sub-species of great apes, including human, we show that long-term selection affects estimates of divergence on the X differently from the autosomes. Divergence increases with increasing distance from genes on both the X chromosome and autosomes, but increases faster on the X chromosome than autosomes, resulting in increasing ratios of X/A divergence in putatively neutral regions. Similarly, divergence is reduced more on the X chromosome in neutral regions near conserved regulatory elements than on the autosomes. Consequently estimates of male mutation bias, which rely on comparing neutral divergence between the X and autosomes, are twice as high in neutral regions near genes versus far from genes. Our results suggest filters for putatively neutral genomic regions differ between the X and autosomes.