Photo by paul.mcgreevy.

At The Molecular Ecologist, guest contributor K.E. Lotterhos discusses an important consideration in designing studies that “scan” the genome for regions experiencing natural selection—to be truly informative, they must “triangulate” using independent data:

Let’s say a number of individuals were collected from heterogeneous environments on the landscape. Some SNPs were significant both in an F_ST outlier analysis and a [genetic-environement association]. Would we consider these SNPs to have two independent sources of evidence?

NO, because the two tests were performed on the same sets of individuals.

What counts as “independent” in this context? I think that’s still something of an open question—but go read the whole thing and se what you think!◼