A codon model for associating phenotypic traits with altered selective patterns of sequence evolution

Detecting the signature of selection in coding sequences and associating it with shifts in phenotypic states can unveil genes underlying complex traits. Of the various signatures of selection exhibited at the molecular level, changes in the pattern of selection at protein coding genes have been of main interest. To this end, phylogenetic branch-site codon models are routinely applied to detect changes in selective patterns along specific branches of the phylogeny. Many of these methods rely on a pre-specified partition of the phylogeny to branch categories, thus treating the course of trait evolution as fully resolved and assuming that phenotypic transitions have occurred only at speciation events. Here we present TraitRELAX, a new phylogenetic model that alleviates these strong assumptions by explicitly accounting for the uncertainty in the evolution of both trait and coding sequences. This joint statistical framework enables the detection of changes in selection intensity upon repeate...