With mutations continually occurring in each protein-coding gene (at a rate of ~1 × 10-5 per gene per generation for nonsynonymous variants)36-39 and fitness losses of less than 1% for most novel nonsynonymous mutations29-31,34, almost every gene is expected to harbor functionally important variants that can be tested through sequencing, even if these variants are rare. ...the strong interest in exome sequencing stems from three factors: the potential to identify many genes underlying complex traits, straightforward functional annotation of coding variation and a substantially lower cost (approximately five times lower) than that of whole-genome sequencing. ...as sample size increases, the number of observed variants grows much faster than is predicted by the neutral model with constant population size41,42 (Fig. 1).