Fine-scale quantification of GC-biased gene conversion intensity in mammals

GC-biased gene conversion (gBGC) is a molecular evolutionary force that favours GC over AT alleles irrespective of their fitness effect. Quantifying the variation in time and across genomes of its intensity is key to properly interpret patterns of molecular evolution. In particular, the existing literature is unclear regarding the relationship between gBGC strength and species effective population size, Ne. Here we analysed the nucleotide substitution pattern in coding sequences of closely related species of mammals, thus accessing a high resolution map of the intensity of gBGC. Our maximum likelihood approach shows that gBGC is pervasive, highly variable among species and genes, and of strength positively correlated with Ne in mammals. We estimate that gBGC explains up to 60% of the total amount of synonymous ATGC substitutions. We show that the fine-scale analysis of gBGC-induced nucleotide substitutions has the potential to inform on various aspects of molecular evolution, such as the distribution of fitness effects of mutations and the dynamics of recombination hotspots.