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Wild progenitors provide a sound baseline model for evolutionary analysis of domesticated crop species

Heredity volume 130, pages 111–113 (2023)Cite this article

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We write to respond to Jensen’s comments on our recently published paper entitled “Hard versus soft selective sweeps during domestication and improvement in soybean” (Zhong et al. 2022). The author has raised two main criticisms of our selection analyses. First, he argued that the effects of purifying and background selection (BGS) were not taken into account when constructing the null demographic model, which could confound our inferences about hard and soft sweeps; second, he questioned the applicability of the test statistics and the empirical outlier approach we used for selection scans. He also noted that these issues are common among many published analyses in evolutionary and ecological genomics, and our paper simply serves as an illustrative example. Here we provide a rebuttal to the critique of our study, although we do not guarantee it is applicable to other publications that were not explicitly indicated.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions and comments during the review process. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant nos. 31801050, 31960433) and China Scholarship Council (grant no. 201806820031).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Molecular Biology and Gene Engineering in Jiangxi, School of Life Sciences, Nanchang University, Nanchang, China

    Limei Zhong & Youlin Zhu

  2. Department of Biology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA

    Kenneth M. Olsen

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  1. Limei Zhong
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  2. Youlin Zhu
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  3. Kenneth M. Olsen
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LZ wrote the manuscript draft, YZ and KMO commented and revised the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Limei Zhong, Youlin Zhu or Kenneth M. Olsen.

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Zhong, L., Zhu, Y. & Olsen, K.M. Wild progenitors provide a sound baseline model for evolutionary analysis of domesticated crop species. Heredity 130, 111–113 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41437-023-00605-w

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41437-023-00605-w

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