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Frequency-dependent Selection

Frequency-dependent Selection

When the fitness of a trait is influenced by how common it is (i.e., its frequency) relative to different traits within a population, this is referred to as frequency-dependent selection. Frequency-dependent selection may occur between species or within a single species. This type of selection can either be positive—with more common phenotypes having higher fitness—or negative, with rarer phenotypes conferring increased fitness.

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 15, 2026

Using SCOPE to Identify Potential Regulatory Motifs in Coregulated Genes

Using SCOPE to Identify Potential Regulatory Motifs in Coregulated Genes

Published on: May 31, 2011

Functional characterization of motif sequences under purifying selection.

De-Hua Chen¹, Andrew Ying-Fei Chang, Ben-Yang Liao

¹Institute of Statistical Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC.

Nucleic Acids Research

|January 11, 2013

Summary

Scientists developed a new method to measure how strongly gene regulatory elements are protected from change. This helps understand how gene networks evolve and adapt to environments, revealing links between natural selection and gene function.

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Mutagenesis and Functional Selection Protocols for Directed Evolution of Proteins in E. coli

Mutagenesis and Functional Selection Protocols for Directed Evolution of Proteins in E. coli

Published on: March 16, 2011

Area of Science:

Evolutionary biology
Genomics
Bioinformatics

Background:

Gene regulatory programs drive life's diversity through changes in proteins and cis-regulatory elements.
Cis-regulatory element evolution is key to gene regulatory network adaptation due to lower selective constraints compared to proteins.
Existing research on cis-regulatory element evolution primarily examines sequence substitutions in known motifs, with limited models for motif occurrence dynamics.

Purpose of the Study:

To develop an algorithm for estimating the strength of purifying selection on motif sequences.
To characterize the evolutionary dynamics of all possible motif sequences.
To link motif evolutionary patterns with functional relevance in gene regulation.

Main Methods:

Proposed an algorithm to estimate purifying selection strength based on motif occurrence birth and death dynamics.
Calculated 'evolutionary retention coefficients' for all possible 10-nucleotide sequences in mammalian promoter regions.
Analyzed 27,748 orthologous gene families across 34 mammalian species.

Main Results:

Motif evolutionary retention coefficients strongly correlate with functional relevance.
High-ranking motifs are enriched with known transcription factor-binding sequences (TRANSFAC, ENCODE ChIP-seq data).
Genes with high-scoring motifs exhibit coherent expression profiles and are involved in gene regulation.

Conclusions:

Natural selection directly influences the function of cis-regulatory elements.
The study provides insights into the evolution of gene regulatory networks.
The developed method quantifies selection on cis-regulatory elements, linking sequence evolution to biological function.