Inferring the timing and strength of natural selection and gene
migration in the evolution of chicken from ancient DNA data
Abstract
With the rapid growth of the number of sequenced ancient genomes, there
has been increasing interest in using this new information to study past
and present adaptation. Such an additional temporal component has the
promise of providing improved power for the estimation of natural
selection. Over the last decade, statistical approaches for detection
and quantification of natural selection from ancient DNA (aDNA) data
have been developed. However, most of the existing methods do not allow
us to estimate the timing of natural selection along with its strength,
which is key to understanding the evolution and persistence of
organismal diversity. Additionally, most methods ignore the fact that
natural populations are almost always structured, which can result in
overestimation of the effect of natural selection. To address these
issues, we propose a novel Bayesian framework for the inference of
natural selection and gene migration from aDNA data with Markov chain
Monte Carlo techniques, co-estimating both timing and strength of
natural selection and gene migration. Such an advance enables us to
infer drivers of natural selection and gene migration by correlating
genetic evolution with potential causes such as the changes in the
ecological context in which an organism has evolved. The performance of
our procedure is evaluated through extensive simulations, with its
utility shown with an application to ancient chicken samples.