美国加州大学滨河分校John P. Barton和香港科技大学J Matthew R. McKay研究组合作取得最新进展。他们利用边际路径可能性（MPL）解决了复杂进化历史中适应性推断的遗传连锁问题。这一成果由该项研究成果发表在2020年11月30日出版的《自然-生物技术》杂志上。
他们开发了MPL，这是一种从进化历史中推断出解决方案，以解决遗传连锁问题的方法。对真实和模拟数据集的验证表明，MPL快速且准确，优于现有的推理方法。他们发现解决连锁问题对于准确量化复的进化群体中的选择至关重要，他们通过使用多个患者数据集对宿主内HIV-1进化进行定量分析来证明这一点。 快速席卷整个种群的变体产生的连锁效应特别强，且延伸至整个基因组。总之，他们的结果表明在自然选择研究中解决连锁问题的重要性。
据介绍，遗传连锁使种群中新突变的命运取决于它们出现的遗传背景。这使得确定个体突变如何影响适应性具有挑战性。
附：英文原文
Title: MPL resolves genetic linkage in fitness inference from complex evolutionary histories
Author: Muhammad Saqib Sohail, Raymond H. Y. Louie, Matthew R. McKay, John P. Barton
Issue&Volume: 2020-11-30
Abstract: Genetic linkage causes the fate of new mutations in a population to be contingent on the genetic background on which they appear. This makes it challenging to identify how individual mutations affect fitness. To overcome this challenge, we developed marginal path likelihood (MPL), a method to infer selection from evolutionary histories that resolves genetic linkage. Validation on real and simulated data sets shows that MPL is fast and accurate, outperforming existing inference approaches. We found that resolving linkage is crucial for accurately quantifying selection in complex evolving populations, which we demonstrate through a quantitative analysis of intrahost HIV-1 evolution using multiple patient data sets. Linkage effects generated by variants that sweep rapidly through the population are particularly strong, extending far across the genome. Taken together, our results argue for the importance of resolving linkage in studies of natural selection. A new method models the influence of genetic background on the fitness effects of mutations.
DOI: 10.1038/s41587-020-0737-3
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-020-0737-3
Nature Biotechnology：《自然—生物技术》，创刊于1996年。隶属于施普林格·自然出版集团，最新IF：68.164
官方网址：https://www.nature.com/nbt/
投稿链接：https://mts-nbt.nature.com/cgi-bin/main.plex
本期文章：《自然—生物技术》：Online/在线发表
