Relaxed selection during a recent human expansion

To better understand and quantify the effect of a recent expansion process on the amount and pattern of mutation load, we screened the ascending genealogies of 3916 individuals from the CARTaGENE cohort (Awadalla et al. 2013) that were linked to the BALSAC genealogical database (http://balsac.uqac.ca/). Using stringent criteria on the quality of genealogical information, we selected (front) individuals whose ancestors were as close as possible to the front of the colonization of Quebec, and (core) individuals whose ancestors were as far as possible from the front. We then sequenced these 102 individuals at very high coverage (mean 89.5X, range 67X-128X) for 106.5 Mb of exomic and UTR regions and contrasted their genomic diversity to detect if sites with various degrees of conservation and deleteriousness had been differentially impacted by selection.EGA study EGAS00001001957