Centre for Biological Diversity

As it becomes easier to sequence multiple genomes from closely related species, evolutionary biologists investigating natural adaptation are struggling to make sense of very large population genomic data sets. Such data hold the potential to resolve long-standing questions in evolutionary biology about the role of selection and genetic drift at different time scales, in diverging populations and species. Standard population genetic models are extremely useful in this attempt, but great challenges exist in measuring natural selection with large-scale data. I present recent model developments to detect signatures of selection in diverging species and experimentally adapting populations.