Skip to content

Selection Pressure

Definition
AI-generated

Selection pressure is the environmental or biological force that makes some heritable traits or alleles more or less advantageous—pathogens, diet, climate, mate choice, competition, or cultural practice—thereby steering the strength and direction of natural selection over time.

Topics
Evolutionary genetics
Related
Gene Flow Natural Selection Negative Selection

Why it matters in GWAS

Hypotheses about local adaptation or trade-offs (e.g. infection resistance, metabolic traits) motivate replication in diverse cohorts and functional follow-up. Selection pressure is invoked cautiously alongside demography and gene flow because similar allele-frequency patterns can arise without adaptation.

Example usage

"Malaria endemicity was discussed as a source of selection pressure on blood-cell traits in the region."

Gene Flow Natural Selection Negative Selection Positive Selection
Related-term network

Click any node to open that term page.

Node order. The current term is first. Next come every page linked from Related terms, in the same top-to-bottom order as that list. Then new terms appear in two-hop layers: for each of those direct neighbors (in that same order), their related terms are appended if not already listed. A third pass does the same for two-hop nodes. The walk stops when a fixed maximum number of nodes is reached.

References

  • Charlesworth B, Charlesworth D. (2010). Elements of Evolutionary Genetics. Roberts and Company.
← Segmental duplication Self-Attention →

Last updated (UTC · Git history)