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Full-Text Articles in Genetics and Genomics
Nonrandom Dispersal And Local Adaptation, Jay F. Storz
Nonrandom Dispersal And Local Adaptation, Jay F. Storz
Jay F. Storz Publications
Two recent studies of wild bird populations provide new insights into mechanisms of microevolutionary change by revealing how variation in fitness-related traits may be maintained over very small spatial scales.
When a population is distributed across a heterogeneous environment, the prospects for local adaptation depend on the spatial scale of fitness variation relative to the spatial scale of dispersal. If the patchiness of environmental conditions is too “fine-grained,” the spatial acuity of natural selection may be severely diminished by the homogenizing effects of gene flow (García-Ramos and Kirkpatrick, 1997; Lenormand, 2002). For example, habitat variation over a scale of several …
Using Genome Scans Of Dna Polymorphism To Infer Adaptive Population Divergence, Jay F. Storz
Using Genome Scans Of Dna Polymorphism To Infer Adaptive Population Divergence, Jay F. Storz
Jay F. Storz Publications
Elucidating the genetic basis of adaptive population divergence is a goal of central importance in evolutionary biology. In principle, it should be possible to identify chromosomal regions involved in adaptive divergence by screening genome-wide patterns of DNA polymorphism to detect the locus-specific signature of positive directional selection. In the case of spatially separated populations that inhabit different environments or sympatric populations that exploit different ecological niches, it is possible to identify loci that underlie divergently selected traits by comparing relative levels of differentiation among large numbers of unlinked markers. In this review I first address the question of whether diversifying …