Reconstructing past changes in locus-specific recombination rates.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Recombination rates vary at the level of the species, population and individual. Now recognized as a transient feature of the genome, recombination rates at a given locus can change markedly over time. Existing inferential methods, predominantly based on linkage disequilibrium patterns, return a long-term average estimate of past recombination rates. Such estimates can be misleading, but no analytical framework to infer recombination rates that have changed over time is currently available.

Results

We apply coalescent modeling in conjunction with a suite of summary statistics to show that the recombination history of a locus can be reconstructed from a time series of genetic samples. More usefully, we describe a new method, based on n-tuple dataset subsampling, to

SUBMITTER: Cox MP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3605148 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature