title: Coalescent tree imbalance and a simple test for selective sweeps based on microsatellite variation.
abstract: Selective sweeps are at the core of adaptive evolution. We study how the shape of coalescent trees is affected by recent selective sweeps. To do so we define a coarse-grained measure of tree topology. This measure has appealing analytical properties, its distribution is derived from a uniform, and it is easy to estimate from experimental data. We show how it can be cast into a test for recent selective sweeps using microsatellite markers and present an application to an experimental data set from Plasmodium falciparum.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computational Genomics, CAS Key Laboratory of Computational Biology, CAS-MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China.
authors.forename: Haipeng
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Wiehe
mesh_terms: D019295:Computational Biology; D003198:Computer Simulation; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D014644:Genetic Variation / Q000235:genetics*; D005828:Genetics, Population / Q000379:methods*; D018895:Microsatellite Repeats / Q000235:genetics*; D008957:Models, Genetic; D010963:Plasmodium falciparum / Q000145:classification / Q000235:genetics