The neutralist-selectionist debate needs moderating, and this paper makes some good contributions, but ultimately disappoints. It defends #NeutralTheory as acknowledging #BackgroundSelection, but does not qualify that this is only a limited form of background selection - one with strong deleterious effects and Ud<1, such that background selection can be captured by a 1-locus model of random #GeneticDrift with lower #EffectivePopulationSize. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/brv.13010?af=R 1/n

Background selection at unlinked sites might not matter if it can be well captured by #EffectivePopulationSize describing #GeneticDrift in a 1-locus model. So we added a figure to demonstrate that this isn't the case. 6/5

@cyrilpedia Not a high bar - #GeneticDrift sensu strictu isn't very important. The real question is randomness due to mutation + recombination + migration (origination rather than subsequent drift of variants) vs the external environment. A bit of a hobby horse of mine: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(11)00882-7 and https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bies.201100178

Is the number alternative splicing a adaption to complexity or maladaption caused by drift?

Results of this preprint indicates that AS rates "reflects the limits set by drift on the capacity of selection to prevent gene expression errors."

#GeneticDrift #transcriptomes #genomic #PopGen

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.09.519597v2