soft sweep

Roesti M, Gavrilets S, Hendry AP, Salzburger W & Berner D 2014 The genomic signature of parallel adaptation from shared genetic variation. Mol Ecol 23:3944-3956.

• implications for ecological genomics
• the common interpretation of regions exhibiting exceptionally low population divergence — that is, localized introgression and balancing selection (Nielsen 2005; Storz 2005) — is problematic
• the same pattern can arise when populations use shared genetic variation for parallel adaptation
• peaks of high population divergence do not necessarily indicate divergent selection
• they might instead reflect selectively neutral regions under the influence of neighbouring loci involved in parallel adaptation from shared variation to similar environments