Process / pipelineSelection testing
McDonald-Kreitman Test
The McDonald-Kreitman (MK) test is a statistical method for detecting adaptive evolution by comparing ratios of synonymous and nonsynonymous substitutions within and between species. Developed by James McDonald and Martin Kreitman in 1991, this test exploits the key insight that neutral mutations accumulate at similar rates within and between species, while adaptive (nonsynonymous) substitutions should be enriched between species if they have been fixed by positive selection. The MK test has become a standard tool in molecular evolutionary biology for identifying genes under natural selection.
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Sources
- McDonald, J. H., & Kreitman, M. (1991). Adaptive protein evolution at the Adh locus in Drosophila. Nature, 351(6328), 652–654. DOI: 10.1038/351652a0 ↗
- Smith, N. G., & Eyre-Walker, A. (2002). Estimating the proportion of sites subject to positive selection across a large dataset. Genetics, 160(3), 1079–1086. DOI: 10.1093/genetics/160.3.1079 ↗
- Charlesworth, B. (2010). The rate of adaptive evolution. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 11(1), 22–26. DOI: 10.1016/S0169-5347(96)81040-2 ↗