Current Issues In Genetics: Pervasive long-range linkage disequilibrium in natural populations of D. melanogaster

On Friday, November 14, I will be giving a talk to the Stanford Genetics department about a paper I am writing on pervasive long-range linkage disequilibrium (LD) in natural populations of D. melanogaster. LD is a measure of the amount of correlation between pairs of polymorphisms in the data, also known in statistics at R^2. The expectation is that polymorphisms far apart from one another should have low amounts of LD because recombination and mutation events should break up any structure in the genome. However, I show that there actually is a very high amount of LD even at long ranges where neutral expectations suggest there should be little to no LD. I suggest that a plausible explanation for the genome-wide elevation in LD is repeatable selective events in the Drosophila genome.