222T Poster - Population Genetics
Thursday June 09, 8:30 PM - 9:15 PM

Authors:
Jared Cole ¹; Peter Golightly ¹; Arbel Harpak ^1,2; Mark Kirkpatrick ¹

Affiliations:
1) Department of Integrative Biology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX; 2) Department of Population Health, University of Texas at Austin, Austin

Keywords:
Natural selection

Sex-specific selection, which occurs when the fitness effects of alleles differ in males and females, has been implicated in the maintenance of genetic variation in natural populations and sex differences in health and disease. Because the sexes mix their autosomal genetic makeup each generation, it has been challenging to quantify the intensity of sex-specific selection using conventional population genetic approaches. Here, we introduce a novel method for estimating the strength of sex-specific selection. Our approach is builds on subtle differentiation in haplotype structure between the sexes that may be generated by viability selection during a single generation. We apply the method to haplotype data from 250K individuals in the UK Biobank. We confirm previous reports showing weak-to-undetectable sex-specific selection at the level of individual loci. At the same time, as we aggregate genome-wide evidence, we estimate a highly polygenic sexually-antagonistic selection. In summary, our results bridge the gap between the underwhelming evidence in human data to date with the longstanding theoretical expectation of pervasive sex-specific selection.