The Hitchhiking Effect of a Strongly Selected Substitution in Male Germline on Neutral Polymorphism in a Monogamy Population

Abstract

Comparative genomic studies suggest that a huge number of genes that show the strongest evidence for positive selection in human are testis- or sperm-specific genes, which are possibly due to germline selection. We propose a novel selection model in which the germlines of heterozygous males in a monogamous population are under natural selection. Under this model, we study the dynamics of a strongly selected substitution in the male germline and its hitch-hiking effect on the preexisting linked neutral polymorphism. We show that the expected heterozygosity at the neural locus is reduced by, where c is the recombination rate between selected and neutral locus, s is selective coefficient of advantageous allele, α = 2Ns and N is diploid effective population size. © 2013 Li et al.