Table 2.
Number of sites under selection | dN/dS and P for Z-test of positive selection (dN > dS) | |||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
MHC class | Exon | nseq (nAAsites) | Pos | Neg | All sites | PSS | Non-passerine PBR | Human PBR | Chicken PBR | |||||
dN/dS | P | dN/dS | P | dN/dS | P | dN/dS | P | dN/dS | P | |||||
MHC-I | 2 | 10(87) | 4 | 6 | 0.713 | 1.000 | 3.336 | 0.004 | 3.293 | 0.007 | 2.579 | 0.013 | ||
MHC-I | 3 | 91(87) | 14 | 9 | 1.054 | 0.429 | 2.893 | 0.007 | 1.137 | 0.394 | 1.708 | 0.181 | 1.733 | 0.140 |
MHC-IIB | 2 | 41(85) | 16 | 3 | 1.337 | 0.171 | 11.472 | 1E-09 | 9.353 | 2E-04 | 7.457 | 0.001 | 5.152 | 2E-04 |
MHC-IIB (no recomb.) | 2 | 36(85) | 15 | 3 | 1.366 | 0.162 | 5.957 | 3E-10 | 6.622 | 2E-04 | 5.143 | 2E-05 | 5.058 | 5E-06 |
Strength of selection was measured with the number of sites under pervasive and episodic positive selection (as inferred with FUBAR and MEME algorithms, respectively) and with the ratio of nonsynonymous substitutions per nonsynonymous site to synonymous substitutions per synonymous site, averaging over all sequence pairs (dN/dS) and Z-test of positive selection (dN > dS) at: (i) all sites; (ii) positively selected sites (PSS); (iii) putative peptide-binding residues (PBR) of non-passerines, as inferred from the global analysis of selection at the avian MHC [34]; and from the crystallographic structure of MHC-I and II molecules for (iv) human peptide-binding residues [19, 20] and (v) chicken peptide-binding residues [23, 59]. Estimates were inferred for all MHC-I and IIB sequences, and for MHC-IIB exon 2 alleles with non-recombinant segments (no recomb.). nseq: number of sequences, nAAsites: number of amino acid sites. Significant (p < 0.05) ratios of dN/dS are in bold