Polygenic adaptation and architecture of human traits
Date
Friday, June 30, 2017 10:00 - 10:45
Speaker
Jonathan Pritchard (Stanford University)
Location
Mondi Seminar Room 3, Central Building
Series
Seminar/Talk
Tags
Life Sciences Seminar
Host
Nick Barton
Contact
One long-standing goal in population and evolutionary genetics has been to understand the genetic basis of evolutionary change. Despite the success of quantitative genetics in plant and animal breeding, the traditional emphasis in experimental population genetics has been on detecting events of relatively strong selection at individual loci - i.e., selective sweeps. In this talk, I will describe work that we are doing to bridge between these traditions: understanding the extremely polygenic basis of many complex traits, and developing methods to detect past selection on polygenic traits. Emphasis will be given to a pair of recent papers from our group: Field et al (2016) and Boyle et al (2017).