• Post category:Artwork

When a mutation within human populations is under positive selection, neighboring DNA sequences hitchhike along with it in a process called selective sweep. These neighboring nucleotides make it difficult to identify which mutation originally caused the natural selection, which is hidden like a ‘needle in the haystack’ within large stretches of DNA.

I made this drawing to illustrate a new Nature Methods paper showing a method that allows pinpointing the favored mutation using computational modeling. Thank you so much and congratulations to Ali Akbari and Vineet Bafna at the University of California San Diego!

Mutation in a Haystack
Identifying a mutation within selective sweeps in human populations.