Effect of beneficial sweeps and background selection on genetic diversity in changing environments

Abstract

Neutral theory predicts that the genetic diversity within a population is proportional to the effective population size. In contrast, the observed genetic diversity for various species vary in a narrow range for several orders of magnitude change in the population sizes (Lewontin’s paradox). The selective sweeps and background selection, reduce the genetic variation at the linked neutral sites and have been studied considering the environment to be selectively constant. However, in a natural population, the selective environment varies with time. Here, we investigate the impact of selective sweeps and background selection on neutral genetic diversity when the selection coefficient changes periodically over time. The reduction in genetic variation due to selective sweeps is known to depend on the conditional fixation time. Here, we find that the effect of changing environment on conditional mean fixation time is most substantial for the randomly mating population than the inbreeding population with arbitrary inbreeding coefficient. We also study the effect of background selection on neutral sites when the selection coefficient of linked deleterious mutation change periodically in time. In the slowly changing environment, we find that neutral heterozygosity is significantly different, and the site frequency spectrum has a different shape than that in the static environment.