Time to the MRCA of a sample in a Wright-Fisher model with variable population size.
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.
Institute of Informatics, Silesian University of Technology, Akademicka 16, 44-100 Gliwice, Poland. tpwojdyla@polsl.pl
Tomasz
T
Wojdyła
Marek
M
Kimmel
Adam
A
Bobrowski
D000465:Algorithms; D005075:Biological Evolution; D005828:Genetics, Population; D008957:Models, Genetic; D011156:Population Density; D013997:Time Factors