I tweeted less than usual, but I blame this on a conference being too close to home (such that I could attend the conference, but still had all the responsibilities of being "home").
Here's a synopsis of ASHG2012. In particular, I'd like to point out that the Nielsen lab got a bullet point, as did my talk!
"- The Nielsen Group is still working on high altitude adaptations. They don’t see hard sweeps. Of course I didn’t get confirmation of whether these were old variants, but it looks as if a lot of preliminary stuff did not have the power to detect anything in the first group. As usual they are up to something.- Speaking of the Nielsen Group, Melissa Wilson Sayres’s work on purifying selection on Y chromosomal lineages was persuasive to me. Basically, effective population differences (e.g, polygyny) just can not explain the lower diversity of the Y lineages (they ran simulations). Luckily for the phylogeographers this won’t impact the utility of Y trees (positive selection would, but that’s not what she’s talking about). I’m a little confused whether it was Sayres’ talk or not, but these results may explain the discordance in coalescence between mtDNA and Y lineages (the former has a deeper coalescence)."
I didn't mention it specifically, but yes, I do think that purifying selection may be able to explain the differing estimates of the TMRCA (time to most recent common ancestor) obtained from mtDNA and chromosome Y studies, by reducing the time to coalescence for the Y lineage.
I'd love to hear what you all took away from the conference.
I'd love to hear what you all took away from the conference.
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