Effects of the population pedigree on genetic signatures of historical demographic events.

Genetic variation among loci in the genomes of diploid biparental organisms is the result of mutation and genetic transmission through the genealogy, or population pedigree, of the species. We explore the consequences of this for patterns of variation at unlinked loci for two kinds of demographic events: the occurrence of a very large family or a strong selective sweep that occurred in the recent past. The results indicate that only rather extreme versions of such events can be expected to structure population pedigrees in such a way that unlinked loci will show deviations from the standard predictions of population genetics, which average over population pedigrees. The results also suggest that large samples of individuals and loci increase the chance of picking up signatures of these events, and that very large families may have a unique signature in terms of sample distributions of mutant alleles.