Thread by @dudutchy

Biologists love balancing selection, but detecting it is hard! Luckily, many new methods to detect signatures of balancing selection from population-level genomic data have been developed recently, and we have a deep overview of those methods for you! 🧵
academic.oup.com/gbe/article/15…

Before diving deep into recent methods, we provide the historical relevance of balancing selection throughout the 20th century

We then explain the different signatures and timescales of balancing selection and the essence of the various methods: what genetic patterns they identify and at what timescales they can detect the signatures of balancing selection.

We also go into the details: what type of data do you need to run each method, what are the strengths and limitations of each one, and what to take into account when choosing the best method for your question.

Finally, we give our opinion about are the most interesting outstanding questions regarding balancing selection: How common is it? Which loci does it influence? What biological processes and phenotypic tradeoffs are they associated with?

We hope this is useful to the community! @AidaAndres , @meyer_diogo, @deboraycb, @GenomeBiolEvol, @DavidEnard #balancingselection #popgen #evolutionarygenomics