Linkage disequilibrium moderates how evolving genetic background shapes variant-level architecture

Abstract

Evolutionary theory offers a unifying explanation for the genetics of complex traits and diseases by modeling how a trait and its genetic basis are maintained by evolutionary forces. A growing body of evidence suggests that linkage disequilibrium (LD) couples a variant’s evolution to that of the genetic background it resides on. However, widely used single-variant theories omit this coupling between variants and the background, or hold the background fixed. We close this gap by developing a model of linkage LD evolution accounting for stabilizing selection, recombination, and genetic drift. The model deduces the genetic architecture of individual variants subject to the co-evolving genetic background. More efficient selection in larger populations is partially offset by slower decay of existing LD and increased generation of new LD. Conversely, noisier LD in smaller populations exposes the variants to episodes of stronger selection. We ask whether ancestry differences in the relationship between effect-size magnitude and minor allele frequency require different selection strengths or can arise from differences in demographic history alone. Stabilizing selection needs to be more than three times stronger in Africans than in Europeans under the constant-size demography, whereas an Out-of-Africa demography alone can explain most of the observed frequency-dependence gap. As this example indicates, selection strength is in general not identifiable from the frequency–effect-size relationship alone, because different combinations of selection and demographic history can produce the same pattern in data with further redundancy added by LD.