Population Genetic Considerations Regarding Evidence for Biased Mutation Rates in Arabidopsis thaliana

It has recently been proposed that lower mutation rates in gene bodies compared with upstream and downstream sequences in Arabidopsis thaliana are the result of an “adaptive” modification of the rate of beneficial and deleterious mutations in these functional regions. This claim was based both on analyses of mutation accumulation lines and on population genomics data. Here, we show that several questionable assumptions were used in the population genomics analyses. In particular, we demonstrate that the difference between gene bodies and less selectively constrained sequences in the magnitude of Tajima's D can in principle be explained by the presence of sites subject to purifying selection and does not require lower mutation rates in regions experiencing selective constraints.