This project aims to describe the patterns of genetic diversity and allelic assocation expected around alleles with heterozygote advantage, in order to help us understand signatures of balancing selection in genomic data.
This project aims to describe the patterns of genetic diversity and allelic assocation expected around alleles with heterozygote advantage, in order to help us understand signatures of balancing selection in genomic data.
Balancing selection by heterozygote advantage occurs when a genetic variant has both positive and negative effects on selected traits, so that on average, the heterozygote genotype has the highest fitness. Such variants are a major problem in animal breeding programs, where monogenic genetic defects can rise to high frequency due to heterozygote advantage. This raises questions about how to efficiently detect and manage such damaging genetic variants.
In this project, you will use individual-based forward-in-time-simulation to investigate the genomic signature of balancing selection by heterozygote advantage on a long and short time scale, at different levels of strength of selection and recombination rate.
Suitable for: Animal Science, Bioinformatics.