
Genome polarisation and barriers to geneflow
Stuart J.E. Baird, Institute of Vertebrate Biology, Czech Academy of Sciences
November 06, 2025 | 15h00 | Hybrid Seminar (Zoom Link; Passcode: 332211)
Admixture, reticulate evolution, hybridisation and adaptive introgression are commonplace, but admixed genomes have been difficult to label in a useful fashion. Genome polarisation uses the linkage disequlibrium generated by admixture to colour a set of genomes by their sources. The algorithm uses no taxonomic priors, no windowing, and scales in linear time to large genomes. Data can be re-sequenced, reduced representation, or mixed. The approach is unbiased by missing data. Applications are diverse. For a hybrid zone, genome regions identified as barriers to geneflow by polarisation correspond to reduced effective migration regions according to the coalescent. I summarise further results regarding conservation and invasion biology, and adaptive introgression. I discuss how the span of the approach might help bridge micro to macro speciation.
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