Deleterious Alleles in the Human Genome Are on Average Younger Than Neutral Alleles of the Same Frequency

Large-scale population sequencing studies provide a complete picture of human genetic variation within the studied populations. A key challenge is to identify, among the myriad alleles, those variants that have an effect on molecular function, phenotypes, and reproductive fitness. Most non-neutral variation consists of deleterious alleles segregating at low population frequency due to incessant mutation. To date, studies characterizing selection against deleterious alleles have been based on allele frequency (testing for a relative excess of rare alleles) or ratio of polymorphism to divergence (testing for a relative increase in the number of polymorphic alleles). Here, starting from Maruyama's theoretical prediction (Maruyama T (1974), Am J Hum Genet USA 6:669–673) that a (slightly) deleterious allele is, on average, younger than a neutral allele segregating at the same frequency, we devised an approach to characterize selection based on allelic age. Unlike existing methods, it compares sets of neutral and deleterious sequence variants at the same allele frequency. When applied to human sequence data from the Genome of the Netherlands Project, our approach distinguishes low-frequency coding non-synonymous variants from synonymous and non-coding variants at the same allele frequency and discriminates between sets of variants independently predicted to be benign or damaging for protein structure and function. The results confirm the abundance of slightly deleterious coding variation in humans. Author Summary: A key challenge in human genetics is to identify, among the multitude of genetic differences between individuals, those that have an effect on traits. Even though new genetic variants arise through mutation in each generation, most are present only in a small proportion of individuals because they have slightly negative effects on fitness. Detecting such slightly deleterious variants is a key challenge in analyzing how genetics influence human characteristics. In this paper, we test a theoretical prediction by Takeo Maruyama from 1974 that a slightly deleterious variant is, on average, younger than a neutral (non affecting fitness) variant present at the same population frequency. Thus our method detects selection by using estimated age of variants. We applied our method to human data from the Genome of the Netherlands Project, and we show that it distinguishes low-frequency protein-modifying variants from silent variants at the same population frequency and discriminates between sets of variants predicted to be benign or damaging for protein structure and function. Our results confirm the abundance of slightly deleterious protein-coding variation in humans.