BACKGROUND
humans possess numerous behaviors absent in other animals.
such behavioral specializations reflect anatomical, physiological and ultimately genetic modifications which occurred during the course of primate evolution.
the nature of the underlying genetic changes has long interested scientists.
according to one influential viewpoint, key genetic differences in primate evolution resulted from changes in the regulation of gene expression  <cit> .
until recently however, there have been few examples of functionally significant cis-regulatory changes in the human lineage.
this is beginning to change with the recent identification of several such cases.
these include changes which occurred in a cis regulatory element of the pdyn gene in the lineage leading to humans  <cit> , and changes in cis-regulatory elements of the lct gene which lead to adult lactase persistence in a number of human populations  <cit> .
whole genome sequencing efforts may now allow us to identify more such cases.
several recent studies have used genome-wide screens to identify noncoding elements which may have been subject to positive selection in human evolution  <cit> .
the basic approach is to look for genomic regions where the human branch contains a surprisingly large number of substitutions-that is regions which have an accelerated substitution rate in the human lineage.
pollard et al.
used a likelihood ratio test approach that compared the branch lengths for each element with what would be expected given a genome wide model for conserved elements rescaled to the conservation level of the given element  <cit> .
prabhakar et al.
developed a different method which incorporated variation in the neutral rate among lineages and loci into its estimation of acceleration  <cit> .
in both cases the main focus was the human terminal lineage after its divergence from chimpanzee.
here we present a new likelihood ratio test method for identifying acceleration in noncoding elements.
our approach is designed to account for lineage specific variation in mutation rates.
we apply it not only to the human terminal lineage, as was done in previous studies, but also to other branches of the primate tree  <cit> .
we identify lists of elements which have been accelerated in these branches, and in addition we report a follow up resequencing study on one of the elements we identified.
in it we find evidence suggestive of a recent selective sweep in the human lineage.
RESULTS
we began with a genome wide set of conserved elements, the phastcons elements  <cit> .
we obtained these for the march  <dig> release of the human genome and subjected them to a variety of filters to eliminate coding sequence, potential mis-alignments, and regions of low sequence quality .
we were left with  <dig>  elements.
these had a median length of  <dig> bp, and 1st and third quartiles of  <dig> and  <dig> bp respectively.
for this set we obtained multiz multiple alignments for  <dig> eutherian mammal species: human, chimpanzee, macaque, mouse, rat and dog  <cit> .
we then used likelihood ratio tests to search these alignments for elements with an accelerated substitution rate in a particular lineage.
figure 1a gives an illustration of the phylogenetic tree for our species.
in the description to follow we will refer to the various internal branches as they are labeled in fig.
1a.
we will call the human lineage after the divergence of chimpanzee the human terminal lineage, and the human lineage after the divergence of macaque  the long human lineage.
in our description of our method below, we use the human terminal lineage as an example.
however we applied this method also to the long human lineage and to internal branch  <dig>
our goal was to identify elements which have undergone acceleration due to changes in selective pressure.
to distinguish changes in selection from changes in mutation rate we compared the rate of molecular evolution in a given element with the rate in nearby ancestral repeats.
for each element we examined, we obtained ancestral repeats in a  <dig> kb window surrounding .
ancestral repeats represent sequence that is likely to be nearly neutral, and therefore allowed us to approximate the local mutation rate.
we then calculated the likelihood of the alignment for each element and its associated repeat alignments jointly under a constrained model, and then separately under an unconstrained model .
the unconstrained model is the same as the constrained with the addition of an extra variable which allows the human terminal branch to grow more rapidly.
the likelihood ratio test  statistic is based on the ratio of these likelihoods, and will be larger in cases where the ratio between the human branch of the element and the human branch of the nearby repeats is significantly greater than the genome wide average.
to assess the significance of these lrts we used a nonparametric bootstrap method to calculate false discovery rates  for our data  <cit>  .
additional file  <dig> contains the  <dig> elements in our 10% fdr group for the human terminal lineage along with the trees calculated for each element, and for nearby repeats.
these elements, which are generally very conserved among vertebrates, are changing extremely rapidly on the human terminal lineage.
in all cases the estimated human branch length of the conserved element is greater than the local neutral branch length as estimated by our ancestral repeat tree.
for the top  <dig> it is roughly an order of magnitude larger.
we wish to understand the genomic processes which produced these elements.
to do so it is important to examine them carefully for biases in features such as their pattern of substitutions or physical positioning.
such biases can provide clues as to what forces produced them.
we examined the position of our elements relative to ensembl gene annotations and found that the accelerated group for the long human branch was enriched near gene deserts .
34% of our starting set of  <dig>  elements fall in or adjacent to a gene desert.
in comparison for the accelerated group on the long human branch, the proportion is 49% .
for internal branch  <dig> and the terminal human branch this trend is not significant after we consider multiple testing.
in an earlier study, pollard et al.
found that in the  <dig> accelerated elements they identified on the human terminal branch there was a substitution bias from at to gc.
at to gc substitutions constituted 57% of their total, while gc to at were 29%.
they suggested that biased gene conversion might contribute to this, an idea that was supported by the fact that their human accelerated elements were enriched in the terminal band of chromosomes.
these regions tend to have a higher recombination rate, and are therefore a likely site of biased gene conversion  <cit> .
it is interesting to ask if these patterns are also true for our group of accelerated elements.
we counted at to gc and gc to at substitutions, omitting cases where the mutation occurred at a hypermutable cg dinucleotide.
we found that in our human terminal group the bias to gc is weaker: 51% of substitutions are at to gc while 31% are gc to at.
this ratio is not significantly different than what we find in the whole set of  <dig>  elements which we screened.
in the long human lineage group the proportion of at to gc substitutions is 45%, which is less than that found in the whole set of elements.
the same is true for the other primate lineage fdr groups.
we should note that though we don't see a significant trend toward bias in the groups of elements we look at, certain individual elements do seem to show a strong trend.
we will discuss one of these below.
and we do find some tendency for our accelerated elements to be located in the final band of chromosomes.
our 10% fdr groups for the long human lineage, and for the terminal human lineage both have a higher proportion of elements in the final band of chromosomes than does the complete set of elements we screened .
the fact that our 10% fdr lists are not strongly biased toward gc is an indication that our method is selecting for a slightly different population of elements than is the method of pollard et al.
we examined the extent to which our results for the human terminal lineage overlap with those of their study, and another by prabhakar et al.
<cit> .
this is illustrated as a venn diagram in figure  <dig>  it is striking that the results from the three studies have relatively little overlap.
the majority of elements found by each study are unique to that study.
this is true despite the fact that they used the same set of multiple alignments.
these studies each have various methodological details which are unique.
for example a feature unique to our study is the use of ancestral repeats to approximate the local mutation rate.
the studies also vary in the level of conservation of the initial set of elements-pollard et al.
started with a smaller and more conserved set than we did.
clearly differences such as these have important effects.
and clearly future refinements will be needed.
the key to improving these screens will be studying their results in more detail, especially in the wet lab.
this can provide independent evidence to help identify elements which have truly undergone positive selection.
in fact, screens of this type are by nature only a first step.
they provide a list of candidate elements which can then be subjected to further experiments.
this is so because various confounding factors can lead to spurious hits.
for example, if an element becomes nonfunctional in the human lineage, this will lead to relaxation of constraint and a higher substitution rate.
accelerations of this type should be less dramatic than those caused by positive selection, but may nevertheless slip into our lists.
the best way to think about these lists, is that they are likely to be enriched for cases of positive selection.
but in any individual case, we must take the element and try to find additional evidence.
we now briefly examine several individual elements, with an emphasis on those near genes involved in brain development.
the second element in the human terminal 10% fdr group is  <dig> bp long, conserved to xenopus, and located at the distal end of the long arm of human chromosome  <dig>  the ratio between its terminal human branch length  and the human branch of nearby ancestral repeats  is about  <dig>  which is dramatically larger than the genome wide average of  <dig> .
this difference is reflected in an lrt of  <dig> , which is greater than any lrt in the nonparametric bootstrap set for this branch.
this element also has the distinction of being the only one found in all three studies in figure  <dig> .
it initially drew our attention because it is located near genes with interesting developmental and regulatory functions.
it is in an intron of the centaurin gamma  <dig> gene , a brain expressed gene involved in membrane trafficking and the regulation of cgmp levels.
centg <dig> belongs to a family of genes which have expanded greatly on the terminal human lineage  <cit> .
this element is also about  <dig> kb downstream of gastrulation brain homeobox  <dig> , a gene which is involved in midbrain-hindbrain segmentation in vertebrate embryos.
figure  <dig> shows an alignment and ucsc genome browser shot of this element.
using publicly available snp data, pollard et al.
found low levels of polymorphism in the region around this element.
their results were suggestive of a selective sweep, but because it was based on snp data with potential ascertainment biases, some questions remained.
to address this, we resequenced a  <dig>  kb region around this element in a global human diversity panel of  <dig> individuals .
we found that the human specific substitutions in the element itself are fixed in our sample of humans.
we also found that the surrounding region has a low level of polymorphism , and a negative tajima's d statistic suggesting an abundance of rare alleles .
levels of polymorphism increase as one moves to the edges of the region we resequenced.
in particular the  <dig> bp on the centromeric side of our region have a much higher level of polymorphism.
this may be due to the fact that they overlap a recombination hotspot as defined by ldhot method  <cit>  using hapmap  <cit>  and perlegen  <cit>  data.
excluding those  <dig> bp, pi in the remaining  <dig> kb region is  <dig>  and tajima's d is - <dig>  .
pollard and colleagues also noted that the region of low polymorphism appears to be about  <dig> kb  <cit> .
this polymorphism data is also interesting regarding the issue of at to gc bias.
polymorphisms have been affected by forces such as selection and biased gene conversion only incompletely.
as such, they are more reflective of mutation pressures than substitutions are  <cit> .
in our resequencing data there is a very strong gc to at bias .
this is strikingly different than the at to gc bias in substitutions .
this says that in element  <dig>  mutational forces are strongly tending to at.
however forces affecting substitutions, such as selection or biased gene conversion have driven in the other direction even more strongly.
to us the fact that this difference is so dramatic suggests the involvement of selection, perhaps in addition to biased gene conversion.
however we cannot eliminate other possibilities.
perhaps biased gene conversion is capable of producing such a dramatic difference by itself  <cit> .
or perhaps it was acting at this locus historically, but a recent change in recombination rate has reduced that influence.
these caveats notwithstanding, we feel that overall our resequencing results are consistent with the idea that selection was involved in the evolution of human element  <dig>  the region of reduced polymorphism we observe, while not large enough to be conclusive, is consistent with a selective sweep.
one possibility would be positive selection for increased gc content in this region, perhaps related to the regulation of a nearby gene.
as pollard et al.
suggested, multiple forces may be at work, including selection and biased gene conversion.
these data were taken from a  <dig>  kb region around element  <dig>  counts are in parentheses.
cases where the mutation was at a hypermutable cg dinucleotide were ommited.
as a second example, we consider an accelerated element on internal branch  <dig> .
it is the 4th element in our 10% fdr group for this branch.
it is  <dig> bp long and conserved to platypus.
the ratio between the length of internal branch  <dig> in this element  and in nearby ancestral repeats  is  <dig> , which is significantly larger than the genome wide average of  <dig>  for this branch.
this is reflected in the element's lrt of  <dig> , which is greater than any lrt in our nonparametric bootstrap set for this branch.
the element is located in an intron of the human neurotrimin  gene.
hnt is an immunoglobulin domain containing cell adhesion molecule of the iglon family which is expressed in the fetal brain and may be involved in controlling neurite outgrowth  <cit> .
hnt is known to have several splice isoforms.
our element is located in an intron just after the transcription start of one of the isoforms, and could be involved in regulating the expression of that transcript.
for the future, we see several ways to improve our method.
ancestral repeats are known to have relatively less constraint than much of the genome.
however it is worth noting that certain processes such as gene conversion may be more common in repeats, and that there may be variation between different kinds of repeats in terms of substitution rates.
such considerations may provide a basis for further improvements in our method.
for example we could focus on certain categories of repeats which are known to have higher average substitution rates, or are less subject to gene conversion.
CONCLUSIONS
we think it will be important to choose cases such as these and obtain direct experimental evidence about their function.
one can begin by using transgenics to study expression in vivo.
for example, in the case of the element located in the hnt gene we can attach the human and mouse versions to reporter constructs.
we determine if these drive expression, and if so whether the human version's expression differs significantly from mouse.
the hope is that in some cases the results of such work will suggest more detailed functional studies, specific to the biology of a particular adaptation.
we are optimistic that these lists and others like them will allow us to get a toehold in understanding the genetic basis of key adaptations in primate evolution.
in this way, we can to begin to unravel the complex set of changes which have occurred in the course of primate evolution.

 humans possess numerous behaviors absent in other animals. such behavioral specializations reflect anatomical, physiological and ultimately genetic modifications which occurred during the course of primate evolution. the nature of the underlying genetic changes has long interested scientists. according to one influential viewpoint, key genetic differences in primate evolution resulted from changes in the regulation of gene expression. until recently however, there have been few examples of functionally significant cis-regulatory changes in the human lineage. this is beginning to change with the recent identification of several such cases. these include changes which occurred in a cis regulatory element of the pdyn gene in the lineage leading to humans, and changes in cis-regulatory elements of the lct gene which lead to adult lactase persistence in a number of human populations. whole genome sequencing efforts may now allow us to identify more such cases. several recent studies have used genome-wide screens to identify noncoding elements which may have been subject to positive selection in human evolution. the basic approach is to look for genomic regions where the human branch contains a surprisingly large number of substitutions-that is regions which have an accelerated substitution rate in the human lineage. pollard et al. used a likelihood ratio test approach that compared the branch lengths for each element with what would be expected given a genome wide model for conserved elements rescaled to the conservation level of the given element. prabhakar et al. developed a different method which incorporated variation in the neutral rate among lineages and loci into its estimation of acceleration. in both cases the main focus was the human terminal lineage after its divergence from chimpanzee. here we present a new likelihood ratio test method for identifying acceleration in noncoding elements. our approach is designed to account for lineage specific variation in mutation rates. we apply it not only to the human terminal lineage, as was done in previous studies, but also to other branches of the primate tree. we identify lists of elements which have been accelerated in these branches, and in addition we report a follow up resequencing study on one of the elements we identified. in it we find evidence suggestive of a recent selective sweep in the human lineage.  we began with a genome wide set of conserved elements, the phastcons elements. we obtained these for the march release of the human genome and subjected them to a variety of filters to eliminate coding sequence, potential mis-alignments, and regions of low sequence quality. we were left with elements. these had a median length of bp, and 1st and third quartiles of and bp respectively. for this set we obtained multiz multiple alignments for eutherian mammal species: human, chimpanzee, macaque, mouse, rat and dog. we then used likelihood ratio tests to search these alignments for elements with an accelerated substitution rate in a particular lineage. figure 1a gives an illustration of the phylogenetic tree for our species. in the description to follow we will refer to the various internal branches as they are labeled in fig. 1a. we will call the human lineage after the divergence of chimpanzee the human terminal lineage, and the human lineage after the divergence of macaque the long human lineage. in our description of our method below, we use the human terminal lineage as an example. however we applied this method also to the long human lineage and to internal branch our goal was to identify elements which have undergone acceleration due to changes in selective pressure. to distinguish changes in selection from changes in mutation rate we compared the rate of molecular evolution in a given element with the rate in nearby ancestral repeats. for each element we examined, we obtained ancestral repeats in a kb window surrounding. ancestral repeats represent sequence that is likely to be nearly neutral, and therefore allowed us to approximate the local mutation rate. we then calculated the likelihood of the alignment for each element and its associated repeat alignments jointly under a constrained model, and then separately under an unconstrained model. the unconstrained model is the same as the constrained with the addition of an extra variable which allows the human terminal branch to grow more rapidly. the likelihood ratio test statistic is based on the ratio of these likelihoods, and will be larger in cases where the ratio between the human branch of the element and the human branch of the nearby repeats is significantly greater than the genome wide average. to assess the significance of these lrts we used a nonparametric bootstrap method to calculate false discovery rates for our data. additional file contains the elements in our 10% fdr group for the human terminal lineage along with the trees calculated for each element, and for nearby repeats. these elements, which are generally very conserved among vertebrates, are changing extremely rapidly on the human terminal lineage. in all cases the estimated human branch length of the conserved element is greater than the local neutral branch length as estimated by our ancestral repeat tree. for the top it is roughly an order of magnitude larger. we wish to understand the genomic processes which produced these elements. to do so it is important to examine them carefully for biases in features such as their pattern of substitutions or physical positioning. such biases can provide clues as to what forces produced them. we examined the position of our elements relative to ensembl gene annotations and found that the accelerated group for the long human branch was enriched near gene deserts. 34% of our starting set of elements fall in or adjacent to a gene desert. in comparison for the accelerated group on the long human branch, the proportion is 49%. for internal branch and the terminal human branch this trend is not significant after we consider multiple testing. in an earlier study, pollard et al. found that in the accelerated elements they identified on the human terminal branch there was a substitution bias from at to gc. at to gc substitutions constituted 57% of their total, while gc to at were 29%. they suggested that biased gene conversion might contribute to this, an idea that was supported by the fact that their human accelerated elements were enriched in the terminal band of chromosomes. these regions tend to have a higher recombination rate, and are therefore a likely site of biased gene conversion. it is interesting to ask if these patterns are also true for our group of accelerated elements. we counted at to gc and gc to at substitutions, omitting cases where the mutation occurred at a hypermutable cg dinucleotide. we found that in our human terminal group the bias to gc is weaker: 51% of substitutions are at to gc while 31% are gc to at. this ratio is not significantly different than what we find in the whole set of elements which we screened. in the long human lineage group the proportion of at to gc substitutions is 45%, which is less than that found in the whole set of elements. the same is true for the other primate lineage fdr groups. we should note that though we don't see a significant trend toward bias in the groups of elements we look at, certain individual elements do seem to show a strong trend. we will discuss one of these below. and we do find some tendency for our accelerated elements to be located in the final band of chromosomes. our 10% fdr groups for the long human lineage, and for the terminal human lineage both have a higher proportion of elements in the final band of chromosomes than does the complete set of elements we screened. the fact that our 10% fdr lists are not strongly biased toward gc is an indication that our method is selecting for a slightly different population of elements than is the method of pollard et al. we examined the extent to which our results for the human terminal lineage overlap with those of their study, and another by prabhakar et al.. this is illustrated as a venn diagram in figure it is striking that the results from the three studies have relatively little overlap. the majority of elements found by each study are unique to that study. this is true despite the fact that they used the same set of multiple alignments. these studies each have various methodological details which are unique. for example a feature unique to our study is the use of ancestral repeats to approximate the local mutation rate. the studies also vary in the level of conservation of the initial set of elements-pollard et al. started with a smaller and more conserved set than we did. clearly differences such as these have important effects. and clearly future refinements will be needed. the key to improving these screens will be studying their results in more detail, especially in the wet lab. this can provide independent evidence to help identify elements which have truly undergone positive selection. in fact, screens of this type are by nature only a first step. they provide a list of candidate elements which can then be subjected to further experiments. this is so because various confounding factors can lead to spurious hits. for example, if an element becomes nonfunctional in the human lineage, this will lead to relaxation of constraint and a higher substitution rate. accelerations of this type should be less dramatic than those caused by positive selection, but may nevertheless slip into our lists. the best way to think about these lists, is that they are likely to be enriched for cases of positive selection. but in any individual case, we must take the element and try to find additional evidence. we now briefly examine several individual elements, with an emphasis on those near genes involved in brain development. the second element in the human terminal 10% fdr group is bp long, conserved to xenopus, and located at the distal end of the long arm of human chromosome the ratio between its terminal human branch length and the human branch of nearby ancestral repeats is about which is dramatically larger than the genome wide average of. this difference is reflected in an lrt of, which is greater than any lrt in the nonparametric bootstrap set for this branch. this element also has the distinction of being the only one found in all three studies in figure. it initially drew our attention because it is located near genes with interesting developmental and regulatory functions. it is in an intron of the centaurin gamma gene, a brain expressed gene involved in membrane trafficking and the regulation of cgmp levels. centg belongs to a family of genes which have expanded greatly on the terminal human lineage. this element is also about kb downstream of gastrulation brain homeobox, a gene which is involved in midbrain-hindbrain segmentation in vertebrate embryos. figure shows an alignment and ucsc genome browser shot of this element. using publicly available snp data, pollard et al. found low levels of polymorphism in the region around this element. their results were suggestive of a selective sweep, but because it was based on snp data with potential ascertainment biases, some questions remained. to address this, we resequenced a kb region around this element in a global human diversity panel of individuals. we found that the human specific substitutions in the element itself are fixed in our sample of humans. we also found that the surrounding region has a low level of polymorphism, and a negative tajima's d statistic suggesting an abundance of rare alleles. levels of polymorphism increase as one moves to the edges of the region we resequenced. in particular the bp on the centromeric side of our region have a much higher level of polymorphism. this may be due to the fact that they overlap a recombination hotspot as defined by ldhot method using hapmap and perlegen data. excluding those bp, pi in the remaining kb region is and tajima's d is -. pollard and colleagues also noted that the region of low polymorphism appears to be about kb. this polymorphism data is also interesting regarding the issue of at to gc bias. polymorphisms have been affected by forces such as selection and biased gene conversion only incompletely. as such, they are more reflective of mutation pressures than substitutions are. in our resequencing data there is a very strong gc to at bias. this is strikingly different than the at to gc bias in substitutions. this says that in element mutational forces are strongly tending to at. however forces affecting substitutions, such as selection or biased gene conversion have driven in the other direction even more strongly. to us the fact that this difference is so dramatic suggests the involvement of selection, perhaps in addition to biased gene conversion. however we cannot eliminate other possibilities. perhaps biased gene conversion is capable of producing such a dramatic difference by itself. or perhaps it was acting at this locus historically, but a recent change in recombination rate has reduced that influence. these caveats notwithstanding, we feel that overall our resequencing results are consistent with the idea that selection was involved in the evolution of human element the region of reduced polymorphism we observe, while not large enough to be conclusive, is consistent with a selective sweep. one possibility would be positive selection for increased gc content in this region, perhaps related to the regulation of a nearby gene. as pollard et al. suggested, multiple forces may be at work, including selection and biased gene conversion. these data were taken from a kb region around element counts are in parentheses. cases where the mutation was at a hypermutable cg dinucleotide were ommited. as a second example, we consider an accelerated element on internal branch. it is the 4th element in our 10% fdr group for this branch. it is bp long and conserved to platypus. the ratio between the length of internal branch in this element and in nearby ancestral repeats is, which is significantly larger than the genome wide average of for this branch. this is reflected in the element's lrt of, which is greater than any lrt in our nonparametric bootstrap set for this branch. the element is located in an intron of the human neurotrimin gene. hnt is an immunoglobulin domain containing cell adhesion molecule of the iglon family which is expressed in the fetal brain and may be involved in controlling neurite outgrowth. hnt is known to have several splice isoforms. our element is located in an intron just after the transcription start of one of the isoforms, and could be involved in regulating the expression of that transcript. for the future, we see several ways to improve our method. ancestral repeats are known to have relatively less constraint than much of the genome. however it is worth noting that certain processes such as gene conversion may be more common in repeats, and that there may be variation between different kinds of repeats in terms of substitution rates. such considerations may provide a basis for further improvements in our method. for example we could focus on certain categories of repeats which are known to have higher average substitution rates, or are less subject to gene conversion.  we think it will be important to choose cases such as these and obtain direct experimental evidence about their function. one can begin by using transgenics to study expression in vivo. for example, in the case of the element located in the hnt gene we can attach the human and mouse versions to reporter constructs. we determine if these drive expression, and if so whether the human version's expression differs significantly from mouse. the hope is that in some cases the results of such work will suggest more detailed functional studies, specific to the biology of a particular adaptation. we are optimistic that these lists and others like them will allow us to get a toehold in understanding the genetic basis of key adaptations in primate evolution. in this way, we can to begin to unravel the complex set of changes which have occurred in the course of primate evolution. 
an approach to identifying these involves comparing multiple genomes to identify conserved regions with an accelerated substitution rate in a particular lineage. we apply it not only to the human terminal lineage, as has been done in previous studies, but also to a number of other branches in the primate tree. we present the top scoring elements, and compare our results with previous studies. these data indicate that the element lies in a region of low polymorphism in humans, consistent with the possibility of a recent selective sweep. such acceleration could be the result of positive selection. our results suggest that screens of this type will be helpful in unraveling the complex set of changes which occurred during primate evolution. a major goal in the study of human evolution is to identify key genetic changes which occurred over the course of primate evolution. we also present resequencing data from one particular element accelerated on the human lineage. they also show that the at to gc bias for polymorphism in this region differs dramatically from that for substitutions.
 a major goal in the study of human evolution is to identify key genetic changes which occurred over the course of primate evolution. according to one school of thought, many such changes are likely to be found in noncoding sequence. an approach to identifying these involves comparing multiple genomes to identify conserved regions with an accelerated substitution rate in a particular lineage. such acceleration could be the result of positive selection.  here we develop a likelihood ratio test method to identify such regions. we apply it not only to the human terminal lineage, as has been done in previous studies, but also to a number of other branches in the primate tree. we present the top scoring elements, and compare our results with previous studies. we also present resequencing data from one particular element accelerated on the human lineage. these data indicate that the element lies in a region of low polymorphism in humans, consistent with the possibility of a recent selective sweep. they also show that the at to gc bias for polymorphism in this region differs dramatically from that for substitutions.  our results suggest that screens of this type will be helpful in unraveling the complex set of changes which occurred during primate evolution. 