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Adaptation – not by sweeps alone

There has been recent progress in identifying selective sweeps underlying a range of adaptations. Jonathan Pritchard and Anna Di Rienzo argue that many adaptive events in natural populations may occur by polygenic adaptation, which would largely go undetected by conventional methods for detecting selection.

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Acknowledgements

We thank G. Coop, J. Pickrell, M. Przeworski and G. Sella for comments, and the National Institutes of Health grants DK56670, GM79558 and MH84703 and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for funding support. We apologize to authors whose work could not be cited owing to space constraints.

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Pritchard, J., Di Rienzo, A. Adaptation – not by sweeps alone. Nat Rev Genet 11, 665–667 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg2880

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