title: Advances and limits of using population genetics to understand local adaptation.
abstract: Local adaptation shapes species diversity, can be a stepping stone to ecological speciation, and can facilitate species range expansion. Population genetic analyses, which complement organismal approaches in advancing our understanding of local adaptation, have become widespread in recent years. We focus here on using population genetics to address some key questions in local adaptation: what traits are involved? What environmental variables are the most important? Does local adaptation target the same genes in related species? Do loci responsible for local adaptation exhibit trade-offs across environments? After discussing these questions we highlight important limitations to population genetic analyses including challenges with obtaining high-quality data, deciding which loci are targets of selection, and limits to identifying the genetic basis of local adaptation.
authors.affiliation: Department of Plant Biology, University of Minnesota, 250 Biosciences, Saint Paul, MN 55108, USA. Electronic address: ptiffin@umn.edu.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Tiffin
authors.affiliation: Department of Plant Sciences, Center for Population Biology, and Genome Center, 262 Robbins Hall, Mail Stop 4, University of California, One Shields Ave, Davis, CA 95616, USA.
authors.forename: Jeffrey
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Ross-Ibarra
mesh_terms: D000222:Adaptation, Physiological / Q000235:genetics*; D000818:Animals; D017360:Arabidopsis / Q000235:genetics; D044822:Biodiversity; D005075:Biological Evolution; D005544:Forecasting; D049810:Genetic Speciation; D005828:Genetics, Population / Q000639:trends*; D006801:Humans / Q000235:genetics; D008954:Models, Biological; D012641:Selection, Genetic
keywords: clinal adaptation; genomics.; selection