Detecting Individual Sites Subject to Episodic Diversifying Selection

The imprint of natural selection on protein coding genes is often difficult to identify because selection is frequently transient or episodic, i.e. it affects only a subset of lineages. Existing computational techniques, which are designed to identify sites subject to pervasive selection, may fail to recognize sites where selection is episodic: a large proportion of positively selected sites. We present a mixed effects model of evolution (MEME) that is capable of identifying instances of both episodic and pervasive positive selection at the level of an individual site. Using empirical and simulated data, we demonstrate the superior performance of MEME over older models under a broad range of scenarios. We find that episodic selection is widespread and conclude that the number of sites experiencing positive selection may have been vastly underestimated. Author Summary: Identifying regions of protein coding genes that have undergone adaptive evolution is important to answering many questions in evolutionary biology and genetics. In order to tease out genetic evidence for natural selection, genes from a diverse array of taxa must be analyzed, only a subset of which may have undergone adaptive evolution; the same gene region may be under stabilizing or relaxed selection in lineages leading to other taxa. Most current computational methods designed to detect the imprint of natural selection at a site in a protein coding gene assume the strength and direction of natural selection is constant across all lineages. Here, we present a method to detect adaptive evolution, even when the selective forces are not constant across taxa. Using a variety of well-characterized genes, we find evidence suggesting that natural selection is generally episodic and that modeling it as such reveals that many more sites are subject to episodic positive selection than previously appreciated.