title: A comparison of two popular statistical methods for estimating the time to most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) from a sample of DNA sequences.
abstract: We have compared two statistical methods of estimating the time to most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) from a sample of DNA sequences, which have been proposed by Templeton (1993) and Bandelt et al. (1995). Monte-Carlo simulations were used for generating DNA sequence data. Different evolutionary scenarios were simulated and the estimation procedures were evaluated. We have found that for both methods (i) the estimates are insensitive to demographic parameters and (ii) the standard deviations of the estimates are too high for these methods to be reliably used in practice.
authors: Anthropology and Human Genetics Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, 203 B. T. Road, Kolkata 700 108, India. ppm@isical.ac.in
authors: Analabha
authors: A
authors: Basu
authors: Partha P
authors: PP
authors: Majumder
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D003198:Computer Simulation; D004247:DNA / Q000235:genetics*; D003710:Demography; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D006801:Humans; D008957:Models, Genetic; D009010:Monte Carlo Method; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D013997:Time Factors
chemical_list: D004247:DNA