Evaluating the association between genome-based relationship patterns and selection signatures- visiting scientist grant

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This application targets the Visiting target grant of HAVBRUK. Nofima would like to invite Dr. Rodríguez-Ramilo for a research stay during three months. She will work in the Breeding and Genetics group. Scientifically, the project is about selection signa tures, which have a great relevance for assessing the feasibility of genome-wide selection programs on aquaculture species. Different methodologies have been proposed to detect selection signatures. However, recent studies comparing the performance of the se approaches have shown that the conclusions derived from analyses to detect selection signatures should be taken with caution. The main objective of this project is to explore how genomic coancestry and inbreeding can be used to identify genomic regions under selection. The hypothesis is that coancestry and inbreeding increase within populations mainly due to genetic drift and selection. However, while the effect of genetic drift is expected to be equal across the whole genome, the effect of selection i s expected to be higher in regions where selective loci exist. Selection on adaptive loci could tend to reduce variation and increase inbreeding and coancestry also in the neighboring regions where neutral loci could be segregating. To corroborate this hy pothesis, simulated data will be generated under several scenarios mimicking aquaculture populations. The performance of the new proposed method described in this application will be compared with previously approaches described in the literature, using t hese simulated data. Once the previous published approaches and the new ones proposed in this project have been standardised with the simulated data, all these methods will be applied to a real data set of Atlantic cod.