The standing pool of genomic structural variation in a natural population of Mimulus guttatus

Major unresolved questions in evolutionary genetics include determining the contributions of different mutational sources to the total pool of genetic variation in a species, and understanding how these different forms of genetic variation interact with natural selection. Recent work has shown that structural variants (insertions, deletions, inversions and transpositions) are a major source of genetic variation, often out-numbering single nucleotide variants in terms of total bases affected. Despite the near ubiquity of structural variants, major questions about their interaction with natural selection remain. For example, how does the allele frequency spectrum of structural variants differ when compared to single nucleotide variants? How often do structural variants affect genes, and what are the consequences? To begin to address these questions, we have systematically identified and characterized a large set submicroscopic insertion and deletion (indel) variants (between 1 kb to 200 k...