title: On the effect of fluctuating recombination rates on the decorrelation of gene histories in the human genome.
abstract: We show how to incorporate fluctuations of the recombination rate along the chromosome into standard gene-genealogical models for the decorrelation of gene histories. This enables us to determine how small-scale fluctuations (Poissonian hot-spot model) and large-scale variations (Kong et al. 2002) of the recombination rate influence this decorrelation. We find that the empirically determined large-scale variations of the recombination rate give rise to a significantly slower decay of correlations compared to the standard, unstructured gene-genealogical model assuming constant recombination rate. A model with long-range recombination-rate variations and with demographic structure (divergent population) is found to be consistent with the empirically observed slow decorrelation of gene histories. Conversely, we show that small-scale recombination-rate fluctuations do not alter the large-scale decorrelation of gene histories.
authors.affiliation: Physics and Engineering Physics, Gothenburg University/Chalmers, 41296 Gothenburg, Sweden.
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Eriksson
authors.forename: B
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Mehlig
mesh_terms: D002895:Chromosomes, Human, Pair 5; D003710:Demography; D014644:Genetic Variation; D005828:Genetics, Population; D015894:Genome, Human; D006801:Humans; D008957:Models, Genetic; D010375:Pedigree; D016012:Poisson Distribution; D020641:Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide; D011995:Recombination, Genetic