Determining population structure from k-mer frequencies.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Understanding population structure within species provides information on connections among different populations and how they evolve over time. This knowledge is important for studies ranging from evolutionary biology to large-scale variant-trait association studies. Current approaches to determining population structure include model-based approaches, statistical approaches, and distance-based ancestry inference approaches.

Methods

In this work, we identify population structure from DNA sequence data using an alignment-free approach. We use the frequencies of short DNA substrings from across the genome (k-mers) with principal component analysis (PCA). K-mer frequencies can be viewed as a summary statistic of a genome and have the advantage of being easily derive

SUBMITTER: Hrytsenko Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11890038 | biostudies-literature | 2025

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature