RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Revisiting the notion of deleterious sweeps JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 2020.11.16.385666 DO 10.1101/2020.11.16.385666 A1 Parul Johri A1 Brian Charlesworth A1 Emma K. Howell A1 Michael Lynch A1 Jeffrey D. Jensen YR 2020 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/11/17/2020.11.16.385666.abstract AB It has previously been shown that, conditional on its fixation, the time to fixation of a semi-dominant deleterious autosomal mutation in a randomly mating population is the same as that of an advantageous mutation. This result implies that deleterious mutations may generate selective sweep effects. Although their fixation probabilities greatly differ, the much larger input of deleterious relative to beneficial mutations suggests that this phenomenon could be important. We here examine how the fixation of mildly deleterious mutations affects levels and patterns of polymorphism at linked sites, and how this class of sites may contribute to divergence between-populations and species. We find that, while deleterious sweeps are unlikely to represent a significant proportion of outliers in polymorphism-based genomic scans within populations, minor shifts in the frequencies of deleterious mutations can influence the proportions of private variants and the value of FST after a recent population split. As sites subject to deleterious mutations are necessarily found in functional genomic regions, interpretations in terms of recurrent positive selection may require reconsideration.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.