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Category Archives: adaptation
Fishing for genetic signals of adaptation
One of the biggest promises of modern DNA sequencing methods is the ability to track the adaptation of living populations at a fine genetic scale, in essentially real time. It’s already been done in a number of experimental evolution systems: … Continue reading
You can evolve there from here. And from here. And here …
If evolutionary history somehow reverted back to the “warm little pond” in which life began, and started over from almost-scratch, would the re-diversification of life end up, four billion years later, pretty much as we see it today? I think … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, genomics, population genetics
Tagged genome scan, Littorina saxatilis, outlier test, pooled sequencing
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Selection keeps an extra-close eye on multi-functional genes
Genes that have roles in multiple traits—pleiotropic genes—have long been thought to be under stronger selection as a result of those multiple functions. The basic logic is that, when a gene produces a protein that has a lot of different … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, genomics, quantitative genetics
Tagged Drosophila melanogaster, mutation accumulation
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Identifying and quantifying fitness effects across loci
The following guest post by Ethan Jewett is cross-posted from the is cross-posted from the CEHG blog at Stanford. Enjoy! The degree to which similarities and differences among species are the result of natural selection, rather than genetic drift, is … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, genomics, population genetics, theory
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The broom of the system: Tracking soft selective sweeps in bacteria colonizing the gut
A growing body of population genetic evidence suggests that adaptive evolutionary change often proceeds via soft selective sweeps, in which beneficial mutations on multiple genetic backgrounds—and potentially at multiple loci—all increase in frequency, but none achieve fixation. This process has … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, microbiology, population genetics
Tagged E coli, gut microbiota, mouse
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What's more isolating—environmental distance or … plain old distance?
We molecular ecologists spend a lot of time thinking about how we can differentiate the effects of natural selection acting on populations in different environments—local adaptation—from the simple isolating effects of, well, being in different places—isolation-by-distance. There’s a considerable literature … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, population genetics
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The "sieve" of selection—and of scientific discovery
One of the many fundamental insights to come out of the early days of population genetics in the first decades of the 20th Century was J.B.S. Haldane’s discovery that, when it comes to natural selection, population size matters. As Haldane … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, population genetics
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On “triangulation” in genome scans
Guest contributor K.E. Lotterhos is a marine biologist at Wake Forest University, who studies evolutionary responses to fishing and climate change. You can find her on Twitter under the handle @dr_k_lo. A major goal of evolutionary biology is to understand the genetic … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, association genetics, genomics, methods, population genetics, quantitative genetics
Tagged evolve-and-resequence, Fst, GEA, GWAS
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Caught in the act: how drug-resistance mutations sweep through populations of HIV
The following guest post by Meredith L. Carpenter is cross-posted from the CEHG blog at Stanford, and it describes recent work by Pleuni Pennings, who was featured in last week’s interview. Enjoy! It has been over 30 years since the … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, medicine, population genetics
3 Comments