Advances and limits of using population genetics to understand local adaptation
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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.
Cite this as
2014. Advances and limits of using population genetics to understand local adaptation. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e488v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.488v1note This preprint is not peer-reviewed. You may wish to reference the subsequent peer-reviewed version of this article.
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.
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Competing Interests
The authors declare no competing interests. Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra is an Academic Editor for PeerJ.
Author Contributions
Peter Tiffin conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed the data, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Funding
We thanks NSF awards (IOS-1238014 and 1237993) for financial support. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
