soft sweep

Vitti JJ, Grossman SR & Sabeti PC 2013 Detecting natural selection in genomic data. Nat Rev Genet 47:97-120.

• LD-based approaches are particularly useful for identifying variants that have undergone a partial or incomplete selective sweep
• this is useful in many species, including humans, as most novel alleles since the out-of-Africa migration with realistic selection coefficients are unlikely to have yet reached fixation
• many will never reach fixation because selective pressures can change greatly over tens of thousands of years
• LD-based approaches can also be used to identify short-term balancing selection, where the signal is comparable with that of an incomplete sweep

• computational methods to identify soft sweeps are within reach
• it remains for researchers to fine-tune current LD-based methods to detect them