Description
Oxford Modern Developments In Theoretical Population Genetics by Montgomery Slatkin , Michel Veuille
Slatkin and Veuille invite leading population geneticists to summarise many of the recent developments in population genetics theory and its application to genetic data. The book has been assembled in honour of the late Gustave Malecot, one of the pioneers of theoretical population genetics. Whilst early chapters summarise Malecot's life and scientific contributions, the rest of the book is devoted to topics that trace their origin in Malecot's work.
Several of the contributions describe recent developments in the coalescent theory, which can be viewed as a generalisation of Malecot's method for analysing identity by descent. Other chapters discuss recent developments in the study of geographic variation, genetic linkage, and allele age. The diversity of topics
and the effectiveness with which various theoretical methods can be applied to DNA sequence data illustrates both the increasing relevance of theoretical population genetics and the depth of Malecot's insight into fundamental genetic processes. This exciting work will be of interest to population and statistical geneticists as well as a wider audience of evolutionary biologists.
1. Introduction ; 2. The scientific work of Gustave Malecot (1911-1998), our common heritage ; 3. Applications and extensions of Malecot's work in human genetics ; 4. Usefulness of the identity coefficients for assessing evolutionary forces ; 5. Pre-speciation coalescence and the effective size of ancestral populations ; 6. Recent applications of diffusion theory to population genetics ; 7. Ancestral inference from gene trees ; 8. Contrast for a within-species comparative method ; 9. The relationship between coalscence times and population divergence times ; 10. Spatio-temporal properties of gene genealogies in geographically structured populations ; 11. Linkage analysis and coalescents ; 12. Separation of time scales and convergence to the coalescent in structured populations ; 13. The age of alleles