Efficient purging of deleterious mutations in plants with haploid selfing
- Univ. of Zurich (Switzerland)
- Duke Univ., Durham, NC (United States)
- Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
In diploid organisms, selfing reduces the efficiency of selection in removing deleterious mutations from a population. This need not be the case for all organisms. Some plants, for example, undergo an extreme form of selfing known as intragametophytic selfing, which immediately exposes all recessive deleterious mutations in a parental genome to selective purging. Here we ask how effectively deleterious mutations are removed from such plants. Specifically, we study the extent to which deleterious mutations accumulate in a predominantly selfing and a predominantly outcrossing pair of moss species, using genome-wide transcriptome data. We find that the selfing species purge significantly more non-synonymous mutations, as well as a greater proportion of radical amino acid changes which alter physicochemical properties of amino acids. Moreover, their purging of deleterious mutation is especially strong in conserved regions of protein-coding genes. Our observations show that selfing need not impede but can even accelerate the removal of deleterious mutations, and do so on a genome-wide scale.
- Research Organization:
- Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-00OR22725
- OSTI ID:
- 1131531
- Journal Information:
- Genome biology and evolution, Vol. 6, Issue 5; ISSN 1759-6653
- Publisher:
- Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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