Reply to: Retesting the influences of mutation accumulation and antagonistic pleiotropy on human senescence and disease

Long and Zhang1 present empirical and conceptual objections to our results2. Concerning data, they observe that a single disease provides nearly all the support for mutation accumulation (MA). On a more theoretical note, they find no evidence for a putative prediction of antagonistic pleiotropy (AP): that at ‘each’ antagonistic pleiotropic single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), the risk allele frequencies (RAFs) should be lower for early-onset rather than late-onset diseases.
This work was supported by Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Spain (with project grants BFU2015-68649-P, BFU2016-77961-P and PGC2018-101927-B-I00, MINECO/AEI/FEDER, UE), the Spanish National Institute of Bioinformatics (PT17/0009/0020), Direcció General de Recerca, Generalitat de Catalunya (2017SGR702, 2017SGR880) and the “Unidad de Excelencia María de Maeztu”, funded by the MINECO (ref: MDM-2014-0370).