Small effective population sizes and rare nonsynonymous variants in potyviruses

Analysis of nucleotide sequence polymorphism in complete genomes of 12 species of potyviruses (single-stranded, positive-sense RNA viruses, family Potyviridae) revealed evidence that long-term effective population sizes of these viruses are on the order of 104. Comparison of nucleotide diversity in non-coding regions and at synonymous and nonsynonymous sites in coding regions showed that purifying selection has acted to eliminate numerous deleterious mutations both at nonsynonymous sites and in non-coding regions. The ratio of nonsynonymous to synonymous polymorphic sites increased as a function of the number of genomes sampled, whereas mean gene diversity at nonsynonymous polymorphic sites decreased with increasing sample size at a substantially faster rate than does mean gene diversity at synonymous polymorphic sites. Very similar relationships were observed both in available genomic sequences of 12 potyvirus species and in subsets created by randomly sampling from among 98 TuMV genomes. Taken together, these observations imply that a greater proportion of nonsynonymous than of synonymous variants are relatively rare as the result of ongoing purifying selection, and thus many nonsynonymous variants are unlikely to be discovered without extensive sampling.