Coalescent theory is a very useful tool in the interpretation of genomic variation data.
Keywords: coalescent; genealogy; recombination; haplotype blocks; selection; inference
Coalescent Theory
Simon Tavaré, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA
Published online: July 2006
DOI: 10.1038/npg.els.0005458
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Figure 1. Coalescent trees for samples of size 6 and 32.
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Figure 2. Coalescent tree of a sample of size 6 (constant population size in the left panel, exponentially growing population in the right panel).
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Figure 3. Ancestral history of three chromosomal segments. See text for details.
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Figure 4. Ancestral recombination graph. Dot-dash lines indicate coalescence events; dotted lines indicate recombination events.
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Figure 5. Coalescent trees in an ancestral recombination graph. The shaded points indicate mutations, which are represented as dots in each coalescent tree.
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Figure 6. Nucleotide diversity and time to most recent common ancestor (MRCA) across a segment.
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Figure 7. Decay of haplotype sharing.
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| Further Reading | |
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| Tang H, Siegmund DO, Shen P, Oefner PJ and Feldman MW (2002) Frequentist estimation of coalescence times from nucleotide sequence data using a tree-based partition. Genetics 161: 447–459. | |
