NESCent / r-popgen-hackathon

Population Genetics Hackathon, to be held at NESCent on March 16-20, 2015
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Project idea: Estimating different measures of effective population size #13

Open EwersAquaGenomics opened 9 years ago

EwersAquaGenomics commented 9 years ago

This is a rather specific idea, but one that, as far as I know, is not well implemented in R. Effective population size (Ne) gives an estimate of the number of individuals that contribute alleles into the next generation. Ne plays a role in most areas of population genetics. Ne determines how fast alleles are fixed in a population, how large selection has to be to be effective in a population, and generally the amount of genetic diversity.

It has its issues, but receives most attention in conservation genetics. Populations with small Ne have low genetic diversity, and have been thought to be at a high risk of extinction. Moreover, different measures integrate Ne over different time scales, allowing the comparison between longterm and current Ne. These comparisons can give valuable insight into population decline and expansion.

I would be interested in compiling a R package that can estimate Ne in different ways, and possibly even compare these measures, using microsats, SNPs and sequence data.

thibautjombart commented 9 years ago

Hi Christine, I like this, and I believe it is actually fairly generic, if you think of it under the coalescent approach umbrella. Then coalescentMCMC is the ideal starting point, and people could contribute various population dynamic models. I suspect a bunch of us, including epidemiologists, might be interested in this.

On Mon, Mar 9, 2015 at 6:53 PM, Christine Ewers-Saucedo < notifications@github.com> wrote:

This is a rather specific idea, but one that, as far as I know, is not well implemented in R. Effective population size (Ne) gives an estimate of the number of individuals that contribute alleles into the next generation. Ne plays a role in most areas of population genetics. Ne determines how fast alleles are fixed in a population, how large selection has to be to be effective in a population, and generally the amount of genetic diversity.

It has its issues, but receives most attention in conservation genetics. Populations with small Ne have low genetic diversity, and have been thought to be at a high risk of extinction. Moreover, different measures integrate Ne over different time scales, allowing the comparison between longterm and current Ne. These comparisons can give valuable insight into population decline and expansion.

I would be interested in compiling a R package that can estimate Ne in different ways, and possibly even compare these measures, using microsats, SNPs and sequence data.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/NESCent/r-popgen-hackathon/issues/13.