A Tutorial of the Poisson Random Field Model in Population Genetics

[摘要] Population genetics is the study of allele frequency changes driven by various evolutionary forces such as mutation, natural selection, and random genetic drift.Although natural selection is widely recognized as a bona-fide phenomenon, the extent to which it drives evolution continues to remain unclear and controversial.Various qualitative techniques, or so-called “tests of neutrality”, have been introduced to detect signatures of natural selection. A decade and a half ago, Stanley Sawyer and Daniel Hartl provided a mathematical framework, referred to as the Poisson random field (PRF), with which to determine quantitatively the intensity of selection on a particular gene or genomic region.The recent availability of large-scale genetic polymorphism data has sparked widespread interest in genome-wide investigations of natural selection.To that end, the original PRF model is of particular interest for geneticists and evolutionary genomicists.In this article, we will provide a tutorial of the mathematical derivation of the original Sawyer and Hartl PRF model.

[发布日期] 2008-06-03