Inferring Demographic History Using Two-Locus Statistics.

ABSTRACT: Population demographic history may be learned from contemporary genetic variation data. Methods based on aggregating the statistics of many single loci into an allele frequency spectrum (AFS) have proven powerful, but such methods ignore potentially informative patterns of linkage disequilibrium (LD) between neighboring loci. To leverage such patterns, we developed a composite-likelihood framework for inferring demographic history from aggregated statistics of pairs of loci. Using this framework, we show that two-locus statistics are more sensitive to demographic history than single-locus statistics such as the AFS. In particular, two-locus statistics escape the notorious confounding of depth and duration of a bottleneck, and they provide a means to estimate effective population size based

SUBMITTER: Ragsdale AP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5499162 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature