Evidence for the Accumulation of Nonsynonymous Mutations and Favorable Pleiotropic Alleles During Wheat Breeding.

Plant breeding leads to the genetic improvement of target traits by selecting a small number of genotypes from among typically large numbers of candidate genotypes after careful evaluation. In this study, we first investigated how mutations at conserved nucleotide sites normally viewed as deleterious, such as nonsynonymous sites, accumulated in a wheat, , breeding lineage. By comparing a 150 year old ancestral and modern cultivar, we found recent nucleotide polymorphisms altered amino acids and occurred within conserved genes at frequencies expected in the absence of purifying selection.