linguistic:paraphrasing, stylistic:style_transfer
Distribution of fitness effects (DFE)

Attempts have been made to infer the distribution of fitness effects (DFE) using mutagenesis experiments and theoretical models applied to molecular sequence data. DFE, as used to determine the relative abundance of different types of mutations (i.e., strongly deleterious, nearly neutral or advantageous), is relevant to many evolutionary questions, such as the maintenance of genetic variation, the rate of genomic decay, the maintenance of outcrossing sexual reproduction as opposed to inbreeding and the evolution of sex and genetic recombination. DFE can also be tracked by tracking the skewness of the distribution of mutations with putatively severe effects as compared to the distribution of mutations with putatively mild or absent effect. In summary, the DFE plays an important role in predicting evolutionary dynamics. A variety of approaches have been used to study the DFE, including theoretical, experimental and analytical methods.

One of the earliest theoretical studies of the distribution of fitness effects was done by Motoo Kimura, an influential theoretical population geneticist. His neutral theory of molecular evolution proposes that most novel mutations will be highly deleterious, with a small fraction being neutral. A later proposal by Hiroshi Akashi proposed a bimodal model for the DFE, with modes centered around highly deleterious and neutral mutations. Both theories agree that the vast majority of novel mutations are neutral or deleterious and that advantageous mutations are rare, which has been supported by experimental results. One example is a study done on the DFE of random mutations in vesicular stomatitis virus. Out of all mutations, 39.6% were lethal, 31.2% were non-lethal deleterious, and 27.1% were neutral. Another example comes from a high throughput mutagenesis experiment with yeast. In this experiment it was shown that the overall DFE is bimodal, with a cluster of neutral mutations, and a broad distribution of deleterious mutations.

Though relatively few mutations are advantageous, those that are play an important role in evolutionary changes. Like neutral mutations, weakly selected advantageous mutations can be lost due to random genetic drift, but strongly selected advantageous mutations are more likely to be fixed. Knowing the DFE of advantageous mutations may lead to increased ability to predict the evolutionary dynamics. Theoretical work on the DFE for advantageous mutations has been done by John H. Gillespie and H. Allen Orr. They proposed that the distribution for advantageous mutations should be exponential under a wide range of conditions, which, in general, has been supported by experimental studies, at least for strongly selected advantageous mutations.

In general, it is accepted that the majority of mutations are neutral or deleterious, with advantageous mutations being rare; however, the proportion of types of mutations varies between species. This indicates two important points: first, the proportion of effectively neutral mutations is likely to vary between species, resulting from dependence on effective population size; second, the average effect of deleterious mutations varies dramatically between species. In addition, the DFE also differs between coding regions and noncoding regions, with the DFE of noncoding DNA containing more weakly selected mutations.