Neuhauser et al. (2003) and Whitham et al. (2003) clearly demonstrate the powerful insights that can be gained from examining the evolutionary process in an ecological context by combining community ecology and population genetics. These approaches show how organism interactions can influence rates and direction of evolution, and how genetic variation within populations can influence patterns o...

"Patterns of differentiation in a colour polymorphism and in neutral markers reveal rapid genetic changes in natural damselfly populations" ABSTRACT 1 The existence and mode of selection operating on heritable adaptive traits can be inferred by 2 comparing population differentiation in neutral genetic variation between populations (often 3 using F st –values) with the corresponding estimates fo...

Fisheries management is getting difficult due to over utilization of fish stocks, pollution and various human activities resulting reduction of genetic resources and variations. Therefore, molecular genetic studies of natural population is dependent on the polymorphic neutral markers and offer the possibility of investigation of population structure and provide scientific data for regulation of...

One of the central goals of evolutionary biology is to understand the genetic basis of adaptive evolution. The availability of nearly complete genome sequences from a variety of organisms has facilitated the collection of data on naturally occurring genetic variation on the scale of hundreds of loci to whole genomes. Such data have changed the focus of molecular population genetics from making ...

Epistatic interactions are widespread, and many of these interactions involve combinations of alleles at different loci that are deleterious when present in the same individual. The average genetic environment of sex-linked genes differs from that of autosomal genes, suggesting that the population genetics of interacting X-linked and autosomal alleles may be complex. Using both analytical theor...

A phenomenon that strongly influences the demography of small introduced populations and thereby potentially their genetic diversity is the demographic Allee effect, a reduction in population growth rates at small population sizes. We take a stochastic modeling approach to investigate levels of genetic diversity in populations that successfully overcame either a strong Allee effect, in which po...

Rosemary P. Collins1,*, Áslaug Helgadóttir2, Bodil E. Frankow-Lindberg3, Leif Skøt1, Charlotte Jones1 and Kirsten P. Skøt1 Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences, Aberystwyth University, Plas Gogerddan, Aberystwyth SY23 3EB, UK, Agricultural University of Iceland, Keldnaholti, 112 Reykjavı́k, Iceland and Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Department of Crop Productio...

Pelodiscus sinensis is a common freshwater soft-shell turtle found in China, and is an important aquaculture species. In this study, 20 polymorphic microsatellite primers were developed from the transcriptome. The genetic diversity of three populations of P. sinensis was evaluated, using 72 individuals. The number of alleles per locus ranged from 3 to 26. The observed and expected heterozygosit...

Many habitat specialist species are originally composed of small, discontinuous populations because their habitats are naturally fragmented or patchy. They may have suffered the long-term effects of natural patchiness. Mediterranean heathlands, a representative habitat in the Strait of Gibraltar region, are associated with nutrient-poor, acidic sandstone soils. Sandstone soil patches in the Afr...

Paleogenomics may suggest changes to the way anthropologists have discussed the dynamics and morphological diversity among Neandertals. Genetic comparisons show that later Neandertals had relatively low autosomal genetic variation compared to recent humans. The known mitochondrial sample from Neandertals covers a broader geographic and temporal range, and shows greater diversity. This review ad...