Recent selective sweeps in North American Drosophila melanogaster show signatures of soft sweeps.

ABSTRACT: Adaptation from standing genetic variation or recurrent de novo mutation in large populations should commonly generate soft rather than hard selective sweeps. In contrast to a hard selective sweep, in which a single adaptive haplotype rises to high population frequency, in a soft selective sweep multiple adaptive haplotypes sweep through the population simultaneously, producing distinct patterns of genetic variation in the vicinity of the adaptive site. Current statistical methods were expressly designed to detect hard sweeps and most lack power to detect soft sweeps. This is particularly unfortunate for the study of adaptation in species such as Drosophila melanogaster, where all three confirmed cases of recent adaptation resulted in soft selective sweeps and where there is evidence that

SUBMITTER: Garud NR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4338236 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature