Speaker:
Yuseob Kim,
School of Life Sciences

Title: Hitchhiking effect of beneficial mutation

Abstract:

Adaptive evolution occurs when mutations that produce new phenotypes are positively selected and spread in the population. Although it is a fundamental process in Darwinian evolution, events of positive selection are hard to observe directly in natural populations of animals and plants. One can however obtain the information regarding ancient beneficial mutations from present-day samples of DNA sequences. This is possible because, when a beneficial mutation spreads quickly in the population, it disturbs the pattern of genetic variation around the site, which can be detected later. I examine mathematical models of this process in order to infer the history of adaptive evolution from DNA sequence data.