Purifying selection in mammalian mitochondrial protein-coding genes is highly effective and congruent with evolution of nuclear genes.

Abstract excerpt

The mammalian mitochondrial genomes differ from the nuclear genomes by maternal inheritance, absence of recombination, and higher mutation rate. All these differences decrease the effective population size of mitochondrial genome and make it more susceptible to accumulation of slightly deleterious mutations. It was hypothesized that mitochondrial genes, especially in species with low effective population size,...

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