The most viewed preprints on Haldane’s Sieve in December 2012 were:

• Comment on “Evidence of Abundant and Purifying Selection in Humans for Recently Acquired Regulatory Functions”. Bray and Pachter argue that there are flaws in a recent paper by Ward and Kellis quantifying the amount of non-coding DNA in humans that is under selective constraint.
• A statistical framework for joint eQTL analysis in multiple tissues. Flutre et al. present a statistical model for detecting eQTLs in multiple tissues, and show that most eQTLs are shared across tissues.
• Epistasis not needed to explain low dN/dS. McCandlish et al. dispute the evidence presented by Breen et al. used to argue that epistasis is the major factor underlying the evolution of protein sequences. An “Our paper” post is here.
• Reconstructing Roma history from genome-wide data. Moorjani et al. present a population genetic analysis of the Roma, and show that they are largely derived from admixture between eastern European and northwest Indian populations.
• Finding the sources of missing heritability in a yeast cross. The commentary by Joe Pickrell on Bloom et al’s preprint from October was highly viewed this month. The preprint describes how Bloom et al. are able to identify the majority of loci contributing to a large number of traits in a yeast cross.