Exposing the complex and flexible genetic basis to polygenic adaptation: integrating population and quantitative genomic approaches (2012-2015)

A major challenge in evolutionary genetics is to understand how organisms adapt to their natural environments. Evidence emerging from genomic studies indicates that the genetic basis to adaptation may be often polygenic; involving many genes of small effect. These data force us not only to re-assess our view of adaptation but also the tools we use to detect it in nature. We will combine population genomic and powerful genome-wide association studies to build an integrative framework for dissecting the changes that underlie adaptive phenotypic divergence along an environmental gradient. Our work leverages years of careful ecological genetic study of adaptive trait divergence along a series of naturally occurring clines.