Hello biostars,
Currently I am doing outliers analysis where I came to some fundamental questions with regard. I
searched in the Internet in order to get things more clear and I found things more complicated than I thought.
In particular I found two terms that look for me the same: Stabilizing and balancing selection, are they??
For clarification let's assume that we want to compare two populations at one locus coded by A and a,
and we found that:
1- In the first population freq A = freq a, and individuals with Aa are approaching 50 % or more, So in this population it seems that heterozygotes at this locus are favored, probably due to better fitness. Is this the same as stabilizing selection??
2- For the second distant population where environmental conditions favors the allele A for better fitness, then individuals with either AA or Aa have a better chance to survive (They have the same phenotype) rather than aa which will be severely reduced over time in this population further,if this rare phenotype is selectively avoided during mating then it will be lost completely. Is this case an example of directional selection? Is this the directional ??
An other question: If we found a locus among different populations to have extremely low or no heterozygosity so it is either
aa or AA then can we simply say that this marker under divergent selection?
and how can we identify neutral loci?
Any hint or recommendation will be appreciated.
Regards
