Reconstructing the history of founder events using genome-wide patterns of allele sharing across individuals.

ABSTRACT: Founder events play a critical role in shaping genetic diversity, fitness and disease risk in a population. Yet our understanding of the prevalence and distribution of founder events in humans and other species remains incomplete, as most existing methods require large sample sizes or phased genomes. Thus, we developed ASCEND that measures the correlation in allele sharing between pairs of individuals across the genome to infer the age and strength of founder events. We show that ASCEND can reliably estimate the parameters of founder events under a range of demographic scenarios. We then apply ASCEND to two species with contrasting evolutionary histories: ~460 worldwide human populations and ~40 modern dog breeds. In humans, we find that over half of the analyzed populations have evidence

SUBMITTER: Tournebize R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9223333 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature