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!