The impact of linked selection on plant genomic variation.

Slotte T

Briefings in Functional Genomics 13 (4) 268-275 [2014-07-00; online 2014-04-23]

Understanding the forces that shape patterns of genetic variation across the genome is a major aim in evolutionary genetics. An emerging insight from analyses of genome-wide polymorphism and divergence data is that selection on linked sites can have an important impact on neutral genetic variation. However, in contrast to Drosophila, which exhibits a signature of recurrent hitchhiking, many plant genomes studied so far seem to mainly be affected by background selection. Moreover, many plants do not exhibit classic signatures of linked selection, such as a correlation between recombination rate and neutral diversity. In this review, I discuss the impact of genome architecture and mating system on the expected signature of linked selection in plants and review empirical evidence for linked selection, with a focus on plant model systems. Finally, I discuss the implications of linked selection for inference of demographic history in plants.

Affiliated researcher

SciLifeLab Fellow

Tanja Slotte

PubMed 24759704

DOI 10.1093/bfgp/elu009

Crossref 10.1093/bfgp/elu009

pii: elu009


Publications 9.5.0