Factors that affect the rates of adaptive and non-adaptive evolution at the gene level in humans and chimpanzees

Abstract

The rate of amino acid substitution has been shown to be correlated to a number of factors including the rate of recombination, the age of the gene, the length of the protein, mean expression level and gene function. However, the extent to which these correlations are due to adaptive and non-adaptive evolution has not been studied in detail, at least not in hominids. We find that the rate of adaptive evolution is significantly positively correlated to the rate of recombination, protein length and gene expression level, and negatively correlated to gene age. The correlations remain significant when each factor is controlled for in turn, except when controlling for expression in an analysis of protein length; and they also remain significant, or marginally significant, when biased gene conversion is controlled for. However, the positive correlations could be an artefact of population size contraction. We also find that the rate of non-adaptive evolution is negatively correlated to each factor, and all these correlations survive controlling for each other and biased gene conversion. Finally, we examine the effect of gene function on rates of adaptive and non-adaptive evolution; we confirm that virus interacting proteins (VIPs) have higher rates of adaptive and lower rates of non-adaptive evolution, but we also demonstrate that there is significant variation in the rate of adaptive and non-adaptive evolution between GO categories when removing VIPs. We estimate that the VIP/non-VIP axis explains about 5-8x more of the variance in evolutionary rate than GO categories.