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Category Archives: population genetics
People behind the Science: Dr. Montgomery Slatkin
To honor his recent election to the National Academy of Sciences, we’re featuring Dr. Montgomery Slatkin of the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Slatkin is known for his work in theoretical population genetics, in particular with regard to gene flow … Continue reading
Posted in interview, population genetics, quantitative genetics
Tagged Montgomery Slatkin
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How A Troublesome Inheritance gets human genetics wrong
Probably since before the origin of modern Homo sapiens, we have known that people from other places—the next village over, the other side of the mountains, or some distant and unexplored land—were different from us. Some of those differences were … Continue reading
Calculating genetic differentiation with R
As molecular ecologists, it is often necessary and useful to calculate some measure of genetic differentiation. This is often accomplished with metrics such as Wright’s Fst an or an unbiased analog (e.g., Weir & Cockerham’s Fst; G’st etc.). In addition … Continue reading
Posted in population genetics, R, software
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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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People behind the Science: Dr. Charles Goodnight
This month, we touch on the always-exciting topic of multilevel selection in our Q&A feature with Dr. Charles Goodnight of the University of Vermont. In addition to his work on multi-level selection, Dr. Goodnight has also studied the effects of founder … Continue reading
Posted in interview, population genetics, quantitative genetics
Tagged Charles Goodnight
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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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