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ESTIMATION OF THE COANCESTRY COEFFICIENT: BASIS FOR A SHORT-TERM GENETIC DISTANCE

John ReynoldsDepartment of Statistics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina 27650B. S. WeirDepartment of Statistics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina 27650C. Clark CockerhamDepartment of Statistics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina 27650
1983en
ABI

Abstract

A distance measure for populations diverging by drift only is based on the coancestry coefficient theta, and three estimators of the distance D = -ln(1 - theta) are constructed for multiallelic, multilocus data. Simulations of a monoecious population mating at random showed that a weighted ratio of single-locus estimators performed better than an unweighted average or a least squares estimator. Jackknifing over loci provided satisfactory variance estimates of distance values. In the drift situation, in which mutation is excluded, the weighted estimator of D appears to be a better measure of distance than others that have appeared in the literature.

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