Detection of signatures of selection using FST

Abstract

Natural selection has molded the evolution of species across all taxa. Much more recently, on an evolutionary scale, human-oriented selection started to play an important role in shaping organisms, markedly so after the domestication of animals and plants. These selection processes have left traceable marks in the genome. Following from the recent advances in molecular genetics technologies, a number of methods have been developed to detect such signals, termed genomic signatures of selection. In this chapter we discuss a straightforward protocol based on the F ST statistic to identify genomic regions that exhibit high variation in allelic frequency between groups, which is a characteristic of genomic regions that have gone through differential selection. How to define the borders of these regions and further explore its genetic content is then discussed. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2013.