Does the Recombination Rate Affect the Efficiency of Purifying Selection? The Yeast Genome Provides a Partial Answer

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Abstract
Much attention has been focused on the effect of recombination on preservation of favorable variants and on reducing the mutational load (Muller 1964 ; Kondrashov 1993 ; Barton 1995 ; Hurst and Peck 1996 ; West, Lively, and Read 1999 ). As most amino acid changes are slightly deleterious (Li 1997 ), their accumulation is expected to depend on the efficiency of purifying selection. Theoretical models have revealed that recombination might prevent the accumulation of such slightly deleterious mutations. This is potentially of importance because it suggests that purifying selection is less effective in genomic regions of low recombination (Hill and Robertson 1966 ; Carvalho and Clark 1999 ; Comeron, Kreitman, and Aguade 1999 ; Comeron and Kreitman 2000 ; Williams and Hurst 2000 ).