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Category Archives: population genetics
Ice-Age Euro-trips
Recent works that attempt to get at human migrations inside Europe paint a complex portrait of migratory events, admixture with archaic hominids, and adaptive evolution to new geographies, and a changing global climate. Analyzing whole genomes of 51 ancient humans … Continue reading
Opening Pandora's box: PSMC and population structure
Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful. — George Box Publication of the Li and Durbin’s 2011 paper titled “Inference of human population history from individual whole-genome sequences” was a milestone in the inference of demography. By allowing … Continue reading
On Integrative Species Delimitation…
Accurate delimitation of species is a fundamental first step that underlies much of what we do in biology. But this can prove challenging in many situations. Why? Let me count the ways. Incomplete lineage sorting, hybridization, morphological conservatism, and niche … Continue reading
Signatures of the reproductive lottery
In marine populations, effective population sizes are usually several orders of magnitude lower than the census size. This difference is thought to be driven by high fecundity, variation in reproductive success and pronounced early mortality, resulting in genetic drift across generations. In … Continue reading
What does the island fox say?
Small populations are characterized by large drift and reduced efficacy of selection effects, which result in fixation of both advantageous and deleterious alleles, accumulation of homozygosity, and often reduction in population fitness. What with plummeting mammal populations across biota, understanding … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, evolution, genomics, mutation, natural history, population genetics, selection
Tagged Evolution, genomics, natural selection, population genetics
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Disentangling the wolf-coyote admixture through an ancestry-based approach
Large carnivores like bears and wolves still pose a puzzle for systematics and population genetics. The more data we get, the more complex their evolutionary history seems to be.
Posted in conservation, evolution, genomics, population genetics
Tagged admixture, coyote, introgression, wolf
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Sweeps and Demographic Inference
Population genetics presents us with numerous conundrums – several of which have to do with how the same genomic disposition can be “reached” over evolutionary time with multiple alternate demographic or selective processes. I have discussed several of these issues … Continue reading
Posted in bioinformatics, evolution, genomics, population genetics, selection, theory
Tagged gene flow, genomics, natural selection, population genetics
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