Measuring viability selection from prospective cohort mortality studies: a case study in Maritime pine

By changing the genetic background available for selection at subsequent life stages, stage-specific selection can define adaptive potential across the life cycle. We propose and evaluate here a neutrality test and a Bayesian method to infer stage-specific viability selection coefficients using sequential random genotypic samples drawn from a longitudinal cohort mortality study, within a generation. The approach is suitable for investigating selective mortality in large natural or experimental cohorts of any organism in which individual tagging and tracking are unfeasible. Numerical simulation results indicate that the method can discriminate loci under strong viability selection and, provided samples are large, yield accurate estimates of the corresponding selection coefficients. Genotypic frequency changes are largely driven by sampling noise under weak selection, however, compromising inference in that case. We apply the proposed methods to analyze viability selection operating at ea...