Stronger and higher proportion of beneficial amino acid changing mutations in humans compared to mice and flies

Abstract

Quantifying and comparing the amount of adaptive evolution among different species is key to understanding evolutionary processes. Previous studies have shown differences in adaptive evolution across species; however, their specific causes remain elusive. Here, we use improved modeling of weakly deleterious mutations and the demographic history of the outgroup species and ancestral population and estimate that at least 20% of nonsynonymous substitutions between humans and an outgroup species were fixed by positive selection. This estimate is much higher than previous estimates, which did not correct for the sizes of the outgroup species and ancestral population. Next, we directly estimate the proportion and selection coefficients (p+ and s+, respectively) of newly arising beneficial nonsynonymous mutations in humans, mice, and Drosophila melanogaster by examining patterns of polymorphism and divergence. We develop a novel composite likelihood framework to test whether these parameters differ across species. Overall, we reject a model with the same p+ and s+ of beneficial mutations across species, and estimate that humans have a higher p+s+ compared to D. melanogaster and mice. We demonstrate that this result cannot be caused by biased gene conversion or hypermutable CpG sites. In summary, we find the proportion of beneficial mutations to be higher in humans than in D. melanogaster or mice, suggesting that organismal complexity, which increases the number of steps required in adaptive walks, may be a key predictor of the amount of adaptive evolution within a species.