Population Genetics Working Group
The Population Genetics Working Group (led by Josefa González and Thomas Flatt) uses the tools of population genetics and genomics to get an improved understanding of the neutral and adaptive evolutionary forces that shape patterns of natural genetic variation in European Drosophila populations. Important subjects tackled by this WG include patterns of genetic diversity, neutral variation, isolation-by-distance, demography, population structure, admixture, and genome-wide patterns of adaptive variation and selective sweeps. A major goal of this WG is also to compare population genomic findings from Europe to the patterns in the ancestral African range of D. melanogaster and to those found on other continents. This is of particular interest given that D. melanogaster has migrated out of Africa into Europe about 10,000 – 15,000 years ago before colonizing other continents.
