Disentangling the effects of geographic and ecological isolation on genetic differentiation.

ABSTRACT: Populations can be genetically isolated both by geographic distance and by differences in their ecology or environment that decrease the rate of successful migration. Empirical studies often seek to investigate the relationship between genetic differentiation and some ecological variable(s) while accounting for geographic distance, but common approaches to this problem (such as the partial Mantel test) have a number of drawbacks. In this article, we present a Bayesian method that enables users to quantify the relative contributions of geographic distance and ecological distance to genetic differentiation between sampled populations or individuals. We model the allele frequencies in a set of populations at a set of unlinked loci as spatially correlated Gaussian processes, in which the covar

SUBMITTER: Bradburd GS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3808528 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature