Presented by Michael Desai, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Department of Physics, Harvard University.  

Abstract: Evolution cannot act on one thing at a time. Instead, because recombination is always limited, natural selection can only act on combinations of mutations across multiple loci that are linked together on physical chromosomes. This effect, known as linked selection, can place enormous constraints on evolution and has dramatic effects on patterns of genetic variation within a population. I will describe methods that we are developing to analyze these effects.