Thursday, 2^nd April, 2015

 16.00 – 17.00
Room OS6 – Oakfield House

 Professor Mark Beaumont
Professor of Statistics, School of Biological Sciences and
School of Mathematics

 

            “Recent Approaches for Detecting Local Selection”

Abstract

In the past 5 years there has been an increased use of methods for detecting the putative effects of natural selection that lead to adaptive differences between populations. At the same time there has been a greatly increased appreciation of the difficulties inherent in such methods, particularly those that lead to false positives. This talk will give a brief review of the area, highlighting the key problems. Most methods are based on detecting outliers under a neutral model of differentiation. I will describe a recent approach (Vitalis, Gautier, Dawson & Beaumont, Genetics, 2014) in which the parameterisation is in terms of Wright's stationary distribution for alleles under selection in an infinite island model. The method appears to have some advantages in terms of ROC characteristics, and reduced sensitivity to the effects of population covariance in allele frequency.

Biography

Professor Mark Beaumont is the Chair in Biostatistics, a joint appointment between Biological Sciences and the Department of Mathematics. Mark specialises in the application of novel Bayesian methods to biological questions. For example, the use of gene frequency information to infer the demographic history of populations, changes in effective population size and patterns of gene-flow and admixture, and also to identify which gene loci are under selection.

 

ALL WELCOME