This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for 2000.
The research and training plan is in the area of Population Biology and is entitled "Maximum likelihood estimates of the rate of occurrence of selected sweeps and of the time to the last selective event in the history of a sample". The rapid fixation of strongly favored mutations, or selective sweeps, is thought to be a common mechanism by which adaptive evolution occurs. For example, humans and chimpanzees differ by only 2% on the DNA level, yet it is this minute genotypic difference that confers enormous differences in phenotype, such as enhanced communication (speech) and cognition. It is suggested that this fact can be attributed to the occurrence of selective sweeps/directional selection of genes that already existed rather than creation of novel genes unique to humans. This research, aims to use computationally-intensive full likelihood methods to estimate the rate of occurrence of adaptive fixations and the time to the last favored substitution in order to identify these genes in humans.
