Advances and limits of using population genetics to understand local adaptation

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1 Department of Plant Biology, University of Minnesota, Saint Paul, MN, USA
2 Department of Plant Sciences, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.488v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Ecology, Evolutionary Studies, Genetics
Keywords
local adaptation, population genetics
Copyright
© 2014 Tiffin et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Tiffin P, Ross-Ibarra J. 2014. Advances and limits of using population genetics to understand local adaptation. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e488v1

Abstract

Local adaptation is an important process shaping within species diversity. In recent years, population genetic analyses, which complement organismal approaches in advancing our understanding of local adaptation have become widespread. Here we focus on using population genetics to address some key questions in local adaptation: What traits are involved? What environmental variables are most important? Does local adaptation target the same genes in related species? Do loci responsible for local adaptation exhibit tradeoffs across environments? After discussing these questions we highlight important limitations to population genetic analyses including challenges with obtaining high quality data, deciding which loci are targets of selection, and limits to identifying the genetic basis of local adaptation.

Author Comment

Local adaptation is an important process shaping within species diversity. In recent years, population genetic analyses, which complement organismal approaches in advancing our understanding of local adaptation have become widespread. Here we focus on using population genetics to address some key questions in local adaptation: What traits are involved? What environmental variables are most important? Does local adaptation target the same genes in related species? Do loci responsible for local adaptation exhibit tradeoffs across environments? After discussing these questions we highlight important limitations to population genetic analyses including challenges with obtaining high quality data, deciding which loci are targets of selection, and limits to identifying the genetic basis of local adaptation.