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. 2014 Jun 9;6(7):1542–1548. doi: 10.1093/gbe/evu116

Discovering Functional DNA Elements Using Population Genomic Information: A Proof of Concept Using Human mtDNA

Daniel R Schrider 1,*, Andrew D Kern 1
PMCID: PMC4122919  PMID: 24916662

Abstract

Identifying the complete set of functional elements within the human genome would be a windfall for multiple areas of biological research including medicine, molecular biology, and evolution. Complete knowledge of function would aid in the prioritization of loci when searching for the genetic bases of disease or adaptive phenotypes. Because mutations that disrupt function are disfavored by natural selection, purifying selection leaves a detectable signature within functional elements; accordingly, this signal has been exploited for over a decade through the use of genomic comparisons of distantly related species. While this is so, the functional complement of the genome changes extensively across time and between lineages; therefore, evidence of the current action of purifying selection in humans is essential. Because the removal of deleterious mutations by natural selection also reduces within-species genetic diversity within functional loci, dense population genetic data have the potential to reveal genomic elements that are currently functional. Here, we assess the potential of this approach by examining an ultradeep sample of human mitochondrial genomes (n = 16,411). We show that the high density of polymorphism in this data set precisely delineates regions experiencing purifying selection. Furthermore, we show that the number of segregating alleles at a site is strongly correlated with its divergence across species after accounting for known mutational biases in human mitochondrial DNA (ρ = 0.51; P < 2.2 × 10−16). These two measures track one another at a remarkably fine scale across many loci—a correlation that is purely the result of natural selection. Our results demonstrate that genetic variation has the potential to reveal with surprising precision which regions in the genome are currently performing important functions and likely to have deleterious fitness effects when mutated. As more complete human genomes are sequenced, similar power to reveal purifying selection may be achievable in the human nuclear genome.

Keywords: population genetics, natural selection, mitochondria

Introduction

Only 1–2% of human genome lies within protein-coding sequence (Lander et al. 2001). Determining the extent to which the remainder of the genome is functional is crucial to our understanding of human biology. A variety of recently developed experimental techniques have aided in the search of noncoding DNA for functional elements (Dunham et al. 2012); however, on their own these techniques can produce a huge number of false positives (Graur et al. 2013). Searches for the evolutionary signature of purifying selection have therefore proved a more fruitful strategy for identifying functional elements; indeed phylogenetic searches comparing sequences of related species have revealed that approximately 5% of the human genome is constrained by natural selection (Chinwalla et al. 2002; Siepel et al. 2005; Lunter et al. 2006; Birney et al. 2007; Davydov et al. 2010), and similar strategies have been used to predict the phenotypic severity of mutations (Stone and Sidow 2005). Although whole-genome comparisons aimed at identifying the footprints of selection are highly effective, they have been used primarily to detect elements under constraint for hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary history (Siepel et al. 2005; Davydov et al. 2010). However, the set of functional elements in the genome experiences considerable turnover (Demuth et al. 2006). Comparative genomic techniques will fail in these instances, particularly for the supremely interesting cases of human-specific gain (Knowles and McLysaght 2009) and loss of function (Wang et al. 2006).

Surveys of genetic diversity within species, on the other hand, have the potential to identify regions currently experiencing purifying selection and that are therefore functional, as purifying selection will remove genetic diversity from such loci. Unfortunately, genetic variation in the human genome is quite sparse, with a comparison of any two homologous chromosomes uncovering less than 1 single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) every kilobase (Lander et al. 2001). Sampling more individuals, however, yields additional polymorphisms, and an ultradeep sample of mitochondrial variation from 16,411 genomes is available in the MITOMAP database (Ruiz-Pesini et al. 2007). These data are extremely polymorphic, with more than one SNP on every other base pair on average. This data set thus serves as an ideal proving ground for the approach of identifying functional constraint using massive amounts of polymorphism data, which will soon be available for nuclear genomes. Here, we show that the density of polymorphism in these data closely tracks divergence at a fine scale, implying that these data can indeed be used to reveal the strength of purifying selection in the human mitochondrial genome at a very high resolution. Our results suggest an enormous potential for population genomic data to uncover functional DNA elements, including those not conserved across species.

Results and Discussion

We set out to determine the extent to which polymorphism data reveal the strength of purifying selection across the human mitochondrial genome and downloaded the coordinates of all 8,944 SNPs from MITOMAP (http://www.mitomap.org/MITOMAP, last accessed August 4, 2013). We reasoned that if the density of polymorphism was governed by the amount of purifying selection acting on each site, then SNP density would be correlated with divergence across species, in accordance with expectations under the Neutral model (Kimura 1982). This is indeed what we observe in the form of a strong correlation between the number of alleles per site and its average negated phyloP score (Siepel et al. 2006) measuring divergence across vertebrates (Spearman’s ρ = 0.52; P < 2.2 × 10−16). This correlation is also highly significant when averaging polymorphism and divergence within 10-bp adjacent windows (ρ = 0.50; P < 2.2 × 10−16; fig. 1).

Fig. 1.—

Fig. 1.—

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The correlation between polymorphism and divergence in the human mitochondrial genome. The average number of alleles per base pair in 10-bp windows is shown in the x-axis and divergence as measured by the negated phyloP score is shown in the y-axis.

Although this observation is consistent with purifying selection both removing diversity and constraining divergence at functional elements, such a pattern could also be generated by variation in the spontaneous mutation rate. It has been shown that mutation rate in the mitochondria varies according to the duration for which a given site remains single stranded on the H strand (DssH) during DNA replication (Reyes et al. 1998). We also find evidence for this in the form of a significant correlation between divergence at each site and the duration the site is single stranded on the H strand during replication, although this correlation is far weaker than that shared between polymorphism and divergence (ρ = 0.11; P < 2.2 × 10−16). Moreover, after correcting for DssH, the correlation between polymorphism and divergence at individual sites is essentially unchanged and still highly significant (ρ = 0.49; P < 2.2 × 10−16).

Rather than being driven by a subset of mitochondrial loci, this correlation is significant (at P < 0.05) in 36/37 genes and is significant in 35/37 genes after correcting for DssH (table 1). Similarly, polymorphism and divergence are more strongly correlated in protein-coding (ρ = −0.53; P < 2.2 × 10−16) and RNA-coding genes (ρ = −0.43; P < 2.2 × 10−16) than noncoding DNA within the control region (ρ = −0.23; P = 9.3 × 10−15) or outside of it (ρ = −0.30; P = 0.021). This correlation is also far stronger at nonsynonymous than synonymous sites (ρ = 0.25 for second codon position sites, P < 2.2 × 10−16; ρ = 0.079 for 4-fold degenerate sites, P = 3.6 × 10−4; fig. 2) as expected if purifying selection is a more predominant force at nonsynonymous sites. Finally, the minor allele frequencies of SNPs from the Human Mitochondrial Genome Database (mtDB; Ingman and Gyllensten 2006) are correlated with divergence (ρ = 0.076; P = 4.0 × 10−16), even though variation in mutation rate is not expect to affect allele frequencies. Thus, purifying selection uniquely drives patterns of polymorphism in the human mitochondrial genome. This finding supports previous reports that purifying selection is a prominent force in the mitochondrial genome (Rand and Kann 1996; Nielsen and Weinreich 1999; Elson et al. 2004; Stewart et al. 2008). The patterns we observed are not the result of positive selection, as the fixation of a beneficial mutation through a selective sweep removes all genetic diversity from a nonrecombining chromosome (Smith and Haigh 1974). We are thus limited to observing mutations occurring since the most recent sweep.

Table 1.

Gene-Specific Correlations Between SNP Density and Negative phyloP Score

Gene Name Gene Description Gene Start (hg19) Gene End (hg19) Spearman’s ρ P Spearman's ρ (Correcting for DssH) P(Correcting for DssH)
MT-TF tRNA phenylalanine 579 649 −0.484 1.90 × 10−5 −0.468948 3.71 × 10−5
MT-RNR1 12S ribosomal RNA 650 1603 −0.429 <2.20 × 10−16 −0.4169046 <2.20 × 10−16
MT-TV tRNA valine 1604 1672 −0.336 0.004783 −0.326022 0.006261
MT-RNR2 16S ribosomal RNA 1673 3230 −0.443 <2.20 × 10−16 −0.4435798 <2.20 × 10−16
MT-TL1 tRNA leucine 1 3231 3305 −0.301 0.008593 −0.29837 0.00932
MT-ND1 NADH dehydrogenase subunit 1 3308 4263 −0.542 <2.20 × 10−16 −0.5149936 <2.20 × 10−16
MT-TI tRNA isoleucine 4264 4332 −0.269 0.02551 −0.2523745 0.03643
MT-TQ tRNA glutamine 4330 4401 −0.463 4.19 × 10−5 −0.476385 2.34 × 10−5
MT-TM tRNA methionine 4403 4470 −0.291 0.01611 −0.2880727 0.01721
MT-ND2 NADH dehydrogenase subunit 2 4471 5512 −0.516 <2.20 × 10−16 −0.461188 <2.20 × 10−16
MT-TW tRNA tryptophan 5513 5580 −0.509 9.42E × 10−6 −0.4626812 7.11 × 10−5
MT-TA tRNA alanine 5588 5656 −0.429 0.0002381 −0.4412621 0.0001475
MT-TN tRNA asparagine 5658 5730 −0.378 0.0009899 −0.3765626 0.001025
MT-TC tRNA cysteine 5762 5827 −0.596 1.26 × 10−7 −0.5709837 5.55 × 10−7
MT-TY tRNA tyrosine 5827 5892 −0.352 0.00371 −0.3486535 0.004118
MT-CO1 Cytochrome c oxidase subunit I 5905 7446 −0.633 <2.20 × 10−16 −0.6186776 <2.20 × 10−16
MT-TS1 tRNA serine 1 7447 7515 −0.627 8.31 × 10−9 −0.6107229 2.51 × 10−8
MT-TD tRNA aspartic acid 7519 7586 −0.365 0.002186 −0.320253 0.007758
MT-CO2 Cytochrome c oxidase subunit II 7587 8270 −0.573 <2.20 × 10−16 −0.5291891 <2.20 × 10−16
MT-TK tRNA lysine 8296 8365 −0.331 0.005158 −0.2809919 0.01846
MT-ATP8 ATP synthase F0 subunit 8 8367 8573 −0.266 0.0001042 −0.2637231 0.0001233
MT-ATP6 ATP synthase F0 subunit 6 8528 9208 −0.389 <2.20 × 10−16 −0.3823366 <2.20 × 10−16
MT-CO3 Cytochrome c oxidase subunit III 9208 9991 −0.538 <2.20 × 10−16 −0.5314281 <2.20 × 10−16
MT-TG tRNA glycine 9992 10059 −0.396 0.0008191 −0.3404812 0.004497
MT-ND3 NADH dehydrogenase subunit 3 10060 10405 −0.510 <2.20 × 10−16 −0.5000739 <2.20 × 10−16
MT-TR tRNA arginine 10406 10470 −0.470 7.66 × 10−5 −0.4415206 0.0002317
MT-ND4L NADH dehydrogenase subunit 4L 10471 10767 −0.491 <2.20 × 10−16 −0.5133884 <2.20 × 10−16
MT-ND4 NADH dehydrogenase subunit 4 10761 12138 −0.561 <2.20 × 10−16 −0.5419698 <2.20 × 10−16
MT-TH tRNA histidine 12139 12207 −0.277 0.02112 −0.1786413 0.1419
MT-TS2 tRNA serine 2 12208 12266 −0.470 0.0001712 −0.489146 8.45 × 10−5
MT-TL2 tRNA leucine 2 12267 12337 −0.374 0.001311 −0.3543069 0.002434
MT-ND5 NADH dehydrogenase subunit 5 12338 14149 −0.532 <2.20 × 10−16 −0.5141183 <2.20 × 10−16
MT-ND6 NADH dehydrogenase subunit 6 14150 14674 −0.500 <2.20 × 10−16 −0.4776221 <2.20 × 10−16
MT-TE tRNA glutamic acid 14675 14743 −0.347 0.003468 −0.3476731 0.003421
MT-CYB Cytochrome b 14748 15888 −0.551 <2.20 × 10−16 −0.5025513 <2.20 × 10−16
MT-TT tRNA threonine 15889 15954 −0.560 1.00 × 10−6 −0.4354723 0.0002578
MT-TP tRNA proline 15957 16024 −0.103 0.4044 −0.1870294 0.1267
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Fig. 2.—

Fig. 2.—

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The correlation between polymorphism and divergence at nonsynonymous and synonymous sites. The number of alleles observed at each site is shown in the x-axis, and divergence (negative phyloP score) is shown in the y-axis at (A) second codon position (nonsynonymous) sites and (B) 4-fold degenerate (synonymous) sites. We added noise to the number of alleles to reveal the density of sites along the y-axis.

Having established that patterns of polymorphism across the human mitochondria are largely determined by purifying selection, we sought to determine the resolution at which these data reveal the strength of selection acting on particular sites in the genome. We examined patterns of SNP diversity and divergence in 5-bp sliding windows across each gene in the mitochondrial genome, observing the extent to which the two measures mirror one another on a small scale. In particular, within each window, we calculated the average SNP density per base pair and the average probability that the site is not conserved across vertebrates according to phastCons (Siepel et al. 2005). We find that for many loci, tRNA genes in particular, these two measures track one another to a surprising extent (e.g., the phenylalanine and tryptophan tRNA genes shown in fig. 3; the remaining tRNA genes are shown in supplementary fig. S1, Supplementary Material online). This result demonstrates that SNP density has the ability to reveal the strength of selection at a surprisingly detailed resolution—on the scale of a few base pairs.

Fig. 3.—

Fig. 3.—

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The probability of polymorphism versus the probability of unconstrained evolution across vertebrates. (A) The 5-bp sliding genomic windows showing SNP density (blue) and one minus the probability of conservation across vertebrates (red) according to phastCons (Siepel et al. 2005) across the phenylalanine tRNA gene. (B) The same plot for the tryptophan tRNA gene.

As a simple proof of concept, we sought to use SNP density to predict function at a fine scale via a hidden Markov model (HMM; Rabiner 1989). Using a similar strategy as phastCons (Siepel et al. 2005), we learned a two-state HMM (constrained vs. unconstrained) where the observation for each site in the genome is the number of alleles at the site. We then used this HMM to predict constrained regions to which we refer as mitoPopCons elements. There is extremely strong overlap between mitoPopCons elements obtained from polymorphism data and phastCons elements predicted from divergence (P < 0.0001; fig. 4; see Materials and Methods). Although mitoPopCons recovers somewhat fewer genic base pairs than phastCons (35.4% of all genic base pairs are recovered by mitoPopCons versus 49.7% by phastCons), mitoPopCons elements contain fewer intergenic base pairs (0.75% of mitoPopCons base pairs are intergenic versus 3.4% of phastCons bases). Given the dramatically deeper evolutionary time period examined by phastCons data, that it seems to perform only marginally better than mitoPopCons underscores the potential of population genetic approaches. phastCons elements are smaller and more numerous (1,395 elements averaging 6.7 bp in length) than mitoPopCons elements (33 elements averaging 167 bp), perhaps implying that phylogenetic data allow for higher resolution prediction than even our dense polymorphism data. On the other hand, element length distributions may have been influenced by the difference in emission probability training methods used for mitoPopCons (trained via the Baum–Welch algorithm; see Materials and Methods) and phastCons elements. In any case, the success of this simple HMM shows that SNP diversity has the ability to accurately predict function at a fine scale in the human mitochondria.

Fig. 4.—

Fig. 4.—

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Comparison of conserved elements called from phylogenetic data and those called from population genetic data. This image form the UCSC Genome Browser shows positions 1–5,000 of the human mitochondrial genome. Conserved elements called from the polymorphism-based HMM (mitoPopCons) appear in blue, whereas phastCons elements obtained from a comparison of mammalian genomes appear in red. phastCons conservation probabilities are shown at the bottom in green. Gene locations are shown at the top.

We have shown that ultradense polymorphism data can be used to accurately detect functional nucleotides in the human mitochondrial genome, potentially at the level of the individual base pair, while sidestepping limitations of phylogenetic approaches. This result suggests that as whole-genome sequencing becomes more ubiquitous, it may become possible to perform such high-resolution prediction in the nuclear genome as well. Applying a polymorphism-based approach to the nuclear genome will present several additional challenges. First, independent assortment and recombination in the nuclear genome cause different loci to have distinct genealogical histories and therefore varying levels of diversity under neutrality, thereby potentially impeding the detection of selection. As another consequence of recombination, both positive (Smith and Haigh 1974) and negative selection (Charlesworth et al. 1993) will have localized effects on flanking variation, rather than genome wide as in the mitochondria. These forces will further increase variance in polymorphism at unselected sites and may thus obscure the signal of negative selection at selected sites.

Another difficulty of the nuclear genome is that its nucleotide diversity is far lower than that of the mitochondrial genome (Lander et al. 2001), meaning that an even larger number of sequences than examined here may be required to accurately detect selection. Moreover, the power to detect function increases logarithmically with sample size (supplementary fig. S2, Supplementary Material online). However, given the ever-increasing rate at which new human genome sequences are released, this problem may not be insurmountable. Finally, there is likely more variation in the strength of purifying selection acting in the nuclear genome than in the mitochondria. As a consequence, weakly constrained but still functionally important regions may evade detection, especially by a two-state method, allowing for only one level of constraint like the HMM used here.

If these hurdles can be overcome, approaches such as ours will then have an enormous impact on biological research, allowing for the discovery of the complete set of functional elements in the human genome and the degree to which new mutations at each site are deleterious. Such efforts will vastly improve predictions of the phenotypic impact of mutations occurring in humans and will prioritize searches for disease-causing mutations. This information will also reveal species-specific changes in selective pressures at the resolution of individual nucleotides, thereby greatly improving our understanding of how the functional components of genomes evolve.

Materials and Methods

We converted all coordinates obtained from MITOMAP and mtDB from the Cambridge Reference Sequence (CRS) coordinate space to the human reference genome’s (GRCh37) coordinate space by aligning the two mitochondrial sequences using MUSCLE (Edgar 2004). We downloaded phyloP scores for each mitochondrial site from the UCSC Genome Browser Database (Meyer et al. 2013). Because there are no allele frequency data available for MITOMAP SNPs, we used the number of alleles at each site as our measure of diversity. For the correlation of minor allele frequency with divergence, we used frequencies of biallelic SNPs from mtDB. We measured the duration of single strandedness (DssH) following Chong and Mueller (2013), using the coordinates of the light-strand origin of replication from MITOMAP. For the DssH analyses, we omitted sites within the control region. To control for the DssH-divergence correlation, we fit a generalized linear model treating the number of segregating alleles at each site as a Poisson distributed response variable and with DssH value as the predictive variable using R. We then calculated the correlation between phyloP scores and the polymorphism residuals.

The HMM analysis was performed in MATLAB with the same transition matrix as used to learn the phastCons HMM for the UCSC Genome Browser (Kent et al. 2002). For each base pair, the emitted observation was the number of alleles (ranging one and four) found in the MITOMAP data set. The rationale for this approach was that after training the HMM, its two states should have different probabilities of emitting 1, 2, 3, or 4 alleles at a given site, and this would result in one state being more likely in stretches of DNA under selective constraint, whereas the other state would have higher likelihood in less constrained sequences. After assigning an initially random emission probability matrix, we then used Baum–Welch training to learn the emission parameters only for the constrained and unconstrained states by using large number of pseudocounts for transition matrix to ensure that it remained invariant during training. To guard against convergence at a poor local optimum, we repeated this process ten times and kept the emission matrix under which the observed sequence data had the highest likelihood. After training, we considered the state with the higher probability of emitting monomorphic sites to be the “functional” state and the other state to be “nonfunctional.” Next, we predicted constrained elements by using the Viterbi algorithm. We tested for significant overlap between our HMM predictions and mammalian phastCons elements from the UCSU Genome Browser by counting the number of base pairs constrained according to both methods and compared this count with those obtained after permuting the coordinates of our predictions. This was repeated for 10,000 permutations to obtain a P value.

To reveal the relationship between sample size and the HMM’s power to recover functional sites, we also repeated the HMM analysis as described above for different sample sizes using the number of alleles at each site in the mtDB set—the MITOMAP set could not be used for this as it lacks reliable allele frequency estimates. The sample sizes we examined ranged from 100 to 1,800, incrementing by 100. We also used a sample size of 1,864, which was the minimum sample size among all SNPs in the mtDB set. For each sample size, we randomly downsampled from the full mtDB data set by randomly drawing the desired number of alleles from the full set at each site without replacement. We then counted the number of distinct alleles observed at each site within the downsampled set, and this number was used as the observation for the HMM.

Supplementary Material

Supplementary figures S1 and S2 are available at Genome Biology and Evolution online (http://www.gbe.oxfordjournals.org/).

Supplementary Data
supp_6_7_1542__index.html (1KB, html)

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health under Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award F32 GM105231-01 to D.R.S. and in part by Rutgers University and National Science Foundation Award MCB-1161367 to A.D.K.

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Associated Data

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Supplementary Materials

Supplementary Data
supp_6_7_1542__index.html (1KB, html)
supp_evu116_Figure_S1.tif (1.1MB, tif)
supp_evu116_Figure_S2.tif (23.7MB, tif)

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