A fine-scale recombination map of the human–chimpanzee ancestor reveals faster change in humans than in chimpanzees and a strong impact of GC-biased gene conversion
- 1Bioinformatics Research Centre, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark;
- 2Institut des Sciences de L'Evolution de Montpellier (ISE-M), UM2-CNRS UMR 5554, Université des sciences et techniques du Languedoc (Montpellier 2), 34095 Montpellier Cedex 5, France;
- 3Institute for Bioscience, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark
Abstract
Recombination is a major determinant of adaptive and nonadaptive evolution. Understanding how the recombination landscape has evolved in humans is thus key to the interpretation of human genomic evolution. Comparison of fine-scale recombination maps of human and chimpanzee has revealed large changes at fine genomic scales and conservation over large scales. Here we demonstrate how a fine-scale recombination map can be derived for the ancestor of human and chimpanzee, allowing us to study the changes that have occurred in human and chimpanzee since these species diverged. The map is produced from more than one million accurately determined recombination events. We find that this new recombination map is intermediate to the maps of human and chimpanzee but that the recombination landscape has evolved more rapidly in the human lineage than in the chimpanzee lineage. We use the map to show that recombination rate, through the effect of GC-biased gene conversion, is an even stronger determinant of base composition evolution than previously reported.
Footnotes
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↵5 Corresponding author
E-mail kaspermunch{at}birc.au.dk
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[Supplemental material is available for this article.]
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Article published online before print. Article, supplemental material, and publication date are at http://www.genome.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gr.158469.113.
- Received April 4, 2013.
- Accepted October 29, 2013.
This article is distributed exclusively by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press for the first six months after the full-issue publication date (see http://genome.cshlp.org/site/misc/terms.xhtml). After six months, it is available under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported), as described at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/.
