Recent Developments in Population Genetics

Abstract

This chapter provides a review of several divergent areas of recent research activity in population genetics to illustrate the span of contemporary research activity in this field. The major goal of experimental population genetics is the description and analysis of genetic variation. Genetic variation is central to evolutionary theory because it governs the rate of population improvement under selection. This new approach to the study of genetic variation has advantages over all previous methods in permitting the detection of genetic differences at the level of primary DNA sequences, unconfounded by gene expression. Applied to the study of individual genes, this approach allows the construction of fine physical maps of sequence variants directly from the primary data. Consequently, genetic variants can be associated with various functional regions of a gene and statistical associations between different polymorphic sites can be investigated. On a broader scale, DNA sequence variation can be used to investigate the evolution of gene families, as well as the evolution of entire genomes, such as those of eukaryotic cell organelles.