Annotated Bibliography

Peterson, K. J., Lyons, J. B., Nowak, K. S., Takacs, C. M., Wargo, M. J., & McPeek, M. A. (2004). Estimating metazoan divergence times with a molecular clock. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 101(17), 6536-6541.

Understanding early animal evolution requires dating the earliest bilaterally symmetrical species. However, based on the fossil record, vertebrates diverged from dipterans (Drosophila) about 900 million years ago (Ma). Although vertebrates and dipterans diverged at almost the same pace, comparative genomics indicates that there was a considerable rate differential between the two groups. However, unlike other invertebrate taxa, vertebrates' molecular evolution pace is slower than different invertebrate taxa.

Charlesworth, B. (1994). The effect of background selection against deleterious mutations on weakly selected, linked variants. Genetics Research, 63(3), 213-227.

This study examines the impact of background selection against harmful alleles on evolutionary rates and genetic variation at weakly selected, totally connected loci. Expected rates of gene replacement and genetic diversity are computed as functions of selecting and dominant in the loci coefficients in issue, and the rate of gametes with no harmful mutations at the background selection loci. Most impacts of background choosing may be anticipated through multiplying the population size through the rate of mutation-free gametes. Background selection may dramatically diminish genetic diversity, such that values for selected sites are similar to values for neutral variations under the same background selection regime. Background selection increases the fixation of harmful mutations while decreasing the fixation of beneficial variants. Autosomal asexual and s ex-linked populations are examined. The ramifications of these findings for molecular variations and evolution investigations are highlighted.

Voight, B. F., Kudaravalli, S., Wen, X., & Pritchard, J. K. (2006). A map of recent positive selection in the human genome. PLoS biology, 4(3), e72.

Finding recent positive selection signals provide information about contemporary people' adaption to local environments. This report is on a genome-wide search for contemporary positive selection favoring non-fixed mutations. It proposes a novel strategy for screening SNP data for recent selection signals and apply it to data from the "International HapMap Project."  In all 3 continental groupings, contemporary positive selection is pervasive. Most indicators are region-specific, although many are group-specific. Instead of a lack of recent selection among Sub-Saharan Africans, we discover that our greatest selection signals come from the Yoruba group. These signals must also suggest locations that generate considerable phenotypic variation since they show the presence of genetic variations with distinct fitnesses. Although this phenotypes are unknown, such loci should be of relevance in complicated trait mapping investigations. We created a list of SNPs that may be used to designate the strongest 250 recent selection signals in each group.