Detecting Signatures of Selection from DNA Sequences Using Datamonkey

• DOI: 10.1007/978-1-59745-251-9_8
• Publication Date: 2009-04-19T01:24:57Z
• Authors: Art F.Y. Poon; Simon D.W. Frost; Sergei L. Kosakov...
• Keywords: Balancing selection; Molecular evolution; Population Genetics

Natural selection is a fundamental process affecting all evolving populations. In the simplest case, positive selection increases the frequency of alleles that confer a fitness advantage relative to the rest of the population, or increases its genetic diversity, and negative selection removes those alleles that are deleterious. Codon-based models of molecular evolution are able to infer signatures of selection from alignments of homologous sequences by estimating the relative rates of synonymous (dS) and non-synonymous substitutions (dN). Datamonkey (http://www.datamonkey.org) provides a user-friendly web interface to a wide collection of state-of-the-art statistical techniques for estimating dS and dN and identifying codons and lineages under selection, even in the presence of recombinant sequences.