Inferring the ancestral dynamics of population size from genome wide molecular data: an ABC approach

Abstract Text: Inferring the ancestral dynamics of effective population size is a long standing question in population genetics, which can now be resolved much more accurately thanks to the availability of massive genomic data in many species, including bovine. We present here a new Approximate Bayesian Computation approach, combining information from linkage disequilibrium and allele frequencies, to tackle this question. We evaluate the performance of this method using cross validation and show that it provides very accurate results up to at least 20,000 generations before present. We then apply it to a sample of 25 diploid bovine genomes, which reveals interesting aspects of cattle history and leads to unexpected large population size estimates.

Keywords:

effective population size, Approximate Bayesian Computation, cattle