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Effect of Divergence Time and Recombination Rate on Molecular Evolution of Drosophila INE-1 Transposable Elements and Other Candidates for Neutrally Evolving Sites

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Abstract

Interspecies divergence of orthologous transposable element remnants is often assumed to be simply due to genetic drift of neutral mutations that occurred after the divergence of the species. However, divergence may also be affected by other factors, such as variation in the mutation rate, ancestral polymorphisms, or selection. Here we attempt to determine the impact of these forces on divergence of three classes of sites that are often assumed to be selectively unconstrained (INE-1 TE remnants, sites within short introns, and fourfold degenerate sites) in two different pairwise comparisons of Drosophila (D. melanogaster vs. D. simulans and D. simulans vs. D. sechellia). We find that divergence of these three classes of sites is strongly influenced by the recombination environment in which they are located, and this is especially true for the closer D. simulans vs. D. sechellia comparison. We suggest that this is mainly a result of the contribution of ancestral polymorphisms in different recombination regions. We also find that intergenic INE-1 elements are significantly more diverged than intronic INE-1 in both pairwise comparisons, implying the presence of either negative selection or lower mutation rates in introns. Furthermore, we show that substitution rates in INE-1 elements are not associated with the length of the noncoding sequence in which they are located, suggesting that reduced divergence in long noncoding sequences is not due to reduced mutation rates in these regions. Finally, we show that GC content for each site within INE-1 sequences has evolved toward an equilibrium value (∼33%) since insertion.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the Genome Sequence Center, WUSTL School of Medicine, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project for providing the genome sequences we analyzed in this study. We also thank Flybase and NCBI for providing genome annotation data. We thank Toby Johnson, Daniel Gaffney, and Brian Charlesworth for helpful comments. J.W. was supported by the Dorothy Hodgkin Postgraduate Studentship Award. Funding for D.L.H. was provided by the Wellcome Trust.

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  1. Institute of Evolutionary Biology, School of Biological Sciences, University of Edinburgh, West Mains Road, Edinburgh, EH9 3JT, UK

    Jun Wang, Peter D. Keightley & Daniel L. Halligan

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  1. Jun Wang
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  2. Peter D. Keightley
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  3. Daniel L. Halligan
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Correspondence to Daniel L. Halligan.

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Wang, J., Keightley, P.D. & Halligan, D.L. Effect of Divergence Time and Recombination Rate on Molecular Evolution of Drosophila INE-1 Transposable Elements and Other Candidates for Neutrally Evolving Sites. J Mol Evol 65, 627–639 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00239-007-9028-6

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