Tuesday, December 16, 2008

High functional diversity of Mycobacterium tuberculosis

imageMycobacterium tuberculosis infects one third of the human world population and kills someone every 15 seconds. For more than a century, scientists and clinicians have been distinguishing between the human- and animal-adapted members of the M. tuberculosis complex (MTBC). However, all human-adapted strains of MTBC have traditionally been considered to be essentially identical. In a paper just published in PloS Biology Ruth Hershberg, Mikhail Lipatov, Dmitri A. Petrov, Peter M. Small, Marcus W. Feldman, Sebastien Gagneux and colleagues surveyed sequence diversity within a global collection of strains belonging to MTBC. They demonstrated that the members of MTBC affecting humans are more genetically diverse than was generally assumed, and that this diversity can be linked to human demographic and migratory events. Furthermore, they showed that MTBC bacteria are under extremely reduced purifying selection and that as a result of increased genetic drift, much of this genetic diversity is likely to have functional consequences. These findings suggest that the current increases in human population, urbanization, and global travel, combined with the population genetic characteristics of M. tuberculosis, could contribute to the emergence and spread of drug-resistant tuberculosis. This article was featured as a Science Journal Editor�s Choice.

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

New and improved D. melanogaster recombination rate calculator is available

imageAnna-sophie Fiston-Lavier further improved the Recombination Rate Calculator. The previously implemented procedure consistently overestimated recombination rate at telomeres. We now define regions of essentially no recombination near telomeres and set recombination rate there at zero. The exact procedure is described in http://petrov.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/recombination-rates_updateR5.pl. We are grateful to Peter Andolfatto for pointing this problem out.

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Inferring selection strength under complex demographic scenarios

image The strength of natural selection against transposable elements (TEs) can be inferred from the frequencies of a sample of TEs. However, complicated demographic histories could lead to a substantial distortion of the TE frequency distribution compared to that expected for a panmictic, constant-sized population. In a paper just published by MBE Josefa Gonzalez, Mike Macpherson, Philip Messer, and Dmitri develop a flexible maximum likelihood methodology that explicitly accounts both for demographic history and for the ascertainment biases of identifying TEs. We apply this method to the newly generated frequency data of the BS family of non-LTR retrotransposons in D. melanogaster in concert with two recent models of the demographic history of the species to infer the intensity of selection against this family. We find the estimate to differ substantially from our own prior estimates made under the assumptions of panmixis. These findings highlight the importance of accounting for demographic history and bear on study design for the inference of selection coefficients generally.