Anastasia Stolyarova, Anna Fedotova and Georgii Bazykin have co-authored a preprint

 

Anastasia Stolyarova, Anna Fedotova and Georgii Bazykin have co-authored a preprint “Complex fitness landscape shapes variation in a hyperpolymorphic species” that has been recently published at bioRxiv. The study  focuses on the fitness landscape of the most polymorphic species known – fungus Schizophyllum commune. The researchers have demonstrated that throughout the genome, short-range linkage disequilibrium caused by attraction of rare alleles is higher between pairs of nonsynonymous than of synonymous sites. This effect is especially pronounced for pairs of sites that are located within the same gene. The authors have found that linkage disequilibrium (LD) tends to be substantially higher for pairs of nonsynonymous sites encoding amino acids that interact within the protein. There is a substantial correlation between LDs at the same pairs of nonsynonymous sites in the USA and the Russian populations. Thus, the scientists concluded that selection in S. commune involves positive epistasis due to compensatory interactions between nonsynonymous alleles. Full text of the preprint is available here.