Adaptive protein evolution in Drosophila

By N. Smith, A. Eyre-Walker. Nature, 2002

691 citations recorded by the source corpus.

For over 30 years a central question in molecular evolution has been whether natural selection plays a substantial role in evolution at the DNA sequence level. Evidence has accumulated over the last decade that adaptive evolution does occur at the protein level, but it has remained unclear how prevalent adaptive evolution is. Here we present a simple method by which the number of adaptive substitutions can be estimated and apply it to data from Drosophila simulans and D. yakuba. We estimate that 45% of all amino-acid substitutions have been fixed by natural selection, and that on average one adaptive substitution occurs every 45 years in these species.

Subfields: Genetics, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/def482a785bfa2b22f5de5b6310b4d485eb14a45

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Genetics

In Molecular Biology

Citations in the corpus

Natural selection on protein-coding genes in the human genome (2005, neutral): “00008 4 27 (8) 176 (101) Ectoderm development 0.”
Merging molecular mechanism and evolution: theory and computation at the interface of biophysics and evolutionary population genetics (2014, background): “Traditional models in evolutionary biology assume the distribution of ﬁtness effects (DFE) and then infer the possible dynamics [1,2], or assume the possible dynamics and then infer the DFE [3 – 5].”
Approximation to the Distribution of Fitness Effects across Functional Categories in Human Segregating Polymorphisms (2014, methodology): “Additionally, because we are using 111 polymorphism data only, positive selection should contribute little to the site-frequency spectrum [32].”
Missense meanderings in sequence space: a biophysical view of protein evolution (2005, result): “Contrary to this, recent analyses indicate that between 45% (Ref”
The modern molecular clock (2003, background): “Recent attempts to measure the proportion of amino-acid changes that are driven by selection might further inform this model of molecular evolutio”
Population Genomics: Whole-Genome Analysis of Polymorphism and Divergence in Drosophila simulans (2007, methodology): “Polarized 2 3 2 contingency tables were used to calculate a, which under some circumstances can be thought of as an estimate of the proportion of variants fixing under selection [11].”