Assistant Professor
Unit for Theoretical Biology, Department of Evolutionary Biology
University of Vienna

Abstract

Advances in sequencing have made an unprecedented amount of genomic data available from diverse organisms. However, disentangling the signatures of different processes – selection, demography and population structure – in sequence variation is often difficult. I will first discuss some challenges of genomic inference, highlighting conceptual gaps and the role of theoretical models. I will then describe recent work where we model the combined influence of natural selection and population structure on quantitative traits. Our analysis clarifies how much variation can be maintained at individual loci and at the level of the trait, within and among sub-populations connected by gene flow. I will also touch upon issues of practical relevance, e.g., to what extent the same or different genetic variants underlie phenotypic variation across different populations (which determines how well genomic analyses ‘generalise’ across populations).