Time to the MRCA of a sample in a Wright–Fisher model with variable population size

Wojdyła, Tomasz, Marek Kimmel and Adam Bobrowski

Theoretical Population Biology, 2011, vol. 80, issue 4, 265-271

Abstract: Determining the expected distribution of the time to the most recent common ancestor of a sample of individuals may deliver important information about the genetic markers and evolution of the population. In this paper, we introduce a new recursive algorithm to calculate the distribution of the time to the most recent common ancestor of the sample from a population evolved by any conditional multinomial sampling model. The most important advantage of our method is that it can be applied to a sample of any size drawn from a population regardless of its size growth pattern. We also present a very efficient method to implement and store the genealogy tree of the population evolved by the Galton–Watson process. In the final section we present results applied to a simulated population with a single bottleneck event and to real populations of known size histories.

Keywords: MRCA; Wright–Fisher model; Dynamic programming; Galton–Watson process (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:thpobi:v:80:y:2011:i:4:p:265-271

DOI: 10.1016/j.tpb.2011.09.003

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