Balancing selection
Mechanisms, timescales, and signatures
By Bárbara Bitarello in Research Projects
June 5, 2024
Balancing Selection is an umbrella term
Balancing selection is an umbrella term for several selective mechanisms that result in the maintenance of adaptive genetic diversity in populations. Among these are heterozygote advantage, negative-frequency dependent selection, and selective pressures which vary in time and space, resulting in the maintenance of more than one allele segregating within a population for longer than expected under neutral evolution.