Skip Navigation


Bioinformatics Advance Access originally published online on April 28, 2008
Bioinformatics 2008 24(12):1421-1425; doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btn205
This Article
Right arrow Full Text Freely available
Right arrow FREE Full Text (Print PDF) Freely available
Right arrow Supplementary Data
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
24/12/1421    most recent
btn205v1
Right arrow Comments: Submit a response
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me when Comments are posted
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Tennessen, J. A.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Tennessen, J. A.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Positive selection drives a correlation between non-synonymous/synonymous divergence and functional divergence

Jacob A. Tennessen

Department of Zoology, 3029 Cordley Hall, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR 97331, USA


  Abstract

Motivation: Functional divergence among proteins is often assumed to be strongly influenced by natural selection, as inferred from the ratio of non-synonymous nucleotide divergence (dN) to synonymous nucleotide divergence (dS). That is, the more a mutation changes protein function, the more likely it is to be either selected against or selectively favored, and because the dN/dS ratio is a measure of natural selection, this ratio can be used to predict the degree of functional divergence (dF). However, these hypotheses have rarely been experimentally tested.

Results: I present a novel method to address this issue, and demonstrate that divergence in bacteria-killing activity among animal antimicrobial peptides is positively correlated with the log of the dN/dS ratio. The primary cause of this pattern appears to be that positively selected substitutions change protein function more than neutral substitutions do. Thus, the dN/dS ratio is an accurate estimator of adaptive functional divergence.

Contact: tennessj{at}science.oregonstate.edu

Supplementary information: Supplementary data, including GenBank Accession numbers, are available at Bioinformatics online.

Associate Editor: Dmitrij Frishman

Received on March 6, 2008; revised on April 21, 2008; accepted on April 22, 2008

Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.