Identifying signatures of selection in genetic time series.

ABSTRACT: Both genetic drift and natural selection cause the frequencies of alleles in a population to vary over time. Discriminating between these two evolutionary forces, based on a time series of samples from a population, remains an outstanding problem with increasing relevance to modern data sets. Even in the idealized situation when the sampled locus is independent of all other loci, this problem is difficult to solve, especially when the size of the population from which the samples are drawn is unknown. A standard χ(2)-based likelihood-ratio test was previously proposed to address this problem. Here we show that the χ(2)-test of selection substantially underestimates the probability of type I error, leading to more false positives than indicated by its P-value, especially at stringent P-valu

SUBMITTER: Feder AF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3914623 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature