Soft shoulders ahead: spurious signatures of soft and partial selective sweeps result from linked hard sweeps.

ABSTRACT: Characterizing the nature of the adaptive process at the genetic level is a central goal for population genetics. In particular, we know little about the sources of adaptive substitution or about the number of adaptive variants currently segregating in nature. Historically, population geneticists have focused attention on the hard-sweep model of adaptation in which a de novo beneficial mutation arises and rapidly fixes in a population. Recently more attention has been given to soft-sweep models, in which alleles that were previously neutral, or nearly so, drift until such a time as the environment shifts and their selection coefficient changes to become beneficial. It remains an active and difficult problem, however, to tease apart the telltale signatures of hard vs. soft sweeps in genomic

SUBMITTER: Schrider DR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4423368 | biostudies-literature | 2015 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature