title: ADZE: a rarefaction approach for counting alleles private to combinations of populations.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Analysis of the distribution of alleles across populations is a useful tool for examining population diversity and relationships. However, sample sizes often differ across populations, sometimes making it difficult to assess allelic distributions across groups.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We introduce a generalized rarefaction approach for counting alleles private to combinations of populations. Our method evaluates the number of alleles found in each of a set of populations but absent in all remaining populations, considering equal-sized subsamples from each population. Applying this method to a worldwide human microsatellite dataset, we observe a high number of alleles private to the combination of African and Oceanian populations. This result supports the possibility of a migration out of Africa into Oceania separate from the migrations responsible for the majority of the ancestry of the modern populations of Asia, and it highlights the utility of our approach to sample size correction in evaluating hypotheses about population history.
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  We have implemented our method in the computer pro-gram ADZE, which is available for download at http://rosenberglab.bioinformatics.med.umich.edu/adze.html.
authors.affiliation: Center for Computational Medicine and Biology, Department of Human Genetics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109, USA. szpiechz@umich.edu
authors.forename: Zachary A
authors.initials: ZA
authors.lastname: Szpiech
authors.forename: Mattias
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Jakobsson
authors.forename: Noah A
authors.initials: NA
authors.lastname: Rosenberg
mesh_terms: D000483:Alleles; D044383:Black People / Q000235:genetics; D014644:Genetic Variation; D005828:Genetics, Population; D005838:Genotype; D006801:Humans; D018895:Microsatellite Repeats; D044468:Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander / Q000235:genetics; D012984:Software
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