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How much does Ne vary among species?

Nicolas Galtier, Marjolaine Rousselle
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/861849
Nicolas Galtier
1ISEM, CNRS, Univ. Montpellier, IRD, EPHE, Montpellier, France
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  • For correspondence: nicolas.galtier@umontpellier.fr
Marjolaine Rousselle
1ISEM, CNRS, Univ. Montpellier, IRD, EPHE, Montpellier, France
2Bioinformatics Research Centre, Aarhus University, DK Aarhus, Denmark
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Abstract

Genetic drift is an important evolutionary force of strength inversely proportional to Ne, the effective population size. The impact of drift on genome diversity and evolution is known to vary among species, but quantifying this effect is a difficult task. Here we assess the magnitude of variation in drift power among species of animals via its effect on the mutation load – which implies also inferring the distribution of fitness effects of deleterious mutations (DFE). To this aim, we analyze the non-synonymous (amino-acid changing) and synonymous (amino-acid conservative) allele frequency spectra in a large sample of metazoan species, with a focus on the primates vs. fruit flies contrast. We show that a Gamma model of the DFE is not suitable due to strong differences in estimated shape parameters among taxa, while adding a class of lethal mutations essentially solves the problem. Using the Gamma + lethal model and assuming that the mean deleterious effects of non-synonymous mutations is shared among species, we estimate that the power of drift varies by a factor of at least 500 between large-Ne and small-Ne species of animals, i.e., an order of magnitude more than the among-species variation in genetic diversity. Our results are relevant to Lewontin’s paradox while further questioning the meaning of the Ne parameter in population genomics.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Footnotes

  • Cite as: Galtier N, Rousselle M (2020) How much does Ne vary among species? bioRxiv, 861849, ver. 3 peer-reviewed and recommended by PCI Evol Biol. doi: 10.1101/861849

  • Same as version 3, with numbers in exponant now appearing correctly.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted May 15, 2020.
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How much does Ne vary among species?
Nicolas Galtier, Marjolaine Rousselle
bioRxiv 861849; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/861849
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How much does Ne vary among species?
Nicolas Galtier, Marjolaine Rousselle
bioRxiv 861849; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/861849

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