Life History Effects on Neutral Diversity Levels of Autosomes and Sex Chromosomes.

Abstract

Understanding the determinants of neutral diversity patterns on autosomes and sex chromosomes provides a bedrock for the interpretation of population genetic data; in particular, differences between the two informs our understanding of sex-specific demographic and mutation processes. While sex-specific age-structure and variation in reproductive success have long been known to affect neutral diversity, theoretical descriptions of these effects were complicated and lacking in generality, stymying attempts to relate diversity patterns of species with their life history. Here, we derive general yet simple expressions for these effects. In particular, we show that life history effects on X-to-autosome ratios of pairwise diversity levels (X:A diversity ratios) depend only on the male-to-female ratios of mutation rates, generation times, and reproductive variances. Our results reveal that changing the male-to-female ratio of generation times has opposite effects on X:A ratios of diversity and divergence. They also explain how sex-specific life histories modulate the response of X:A diversity ratios to changes in population size. More generally, they clarify that sex-specific life history-generation times in particular-should have marked effects on X:A diversity ratios in many taxa and enable further investigation of these effects.