Adaptation in Drosophila
Understanding how organisms adapt to their environments is a long-standing question in Biology with far-reaching implications: adaptation affects the ability of species to survive in changing environments, host-pathogen interactions, and resistance to pesticides and drugs. Despite recent progress, adaptation is to date a poorly understood process partly due to limitations of current approaches that focus (i) on a priori candidate genes/traits, (ii) on signals of selection at the DNA level without functional validation of the identified candidates, (iii) on SNP variants, while other types of mutations relevant for adaptive evolution are largely ignored, and (iv) on subsets of adaptive mutations that do not represent the variability present in natural populations. Continue Reading