In:
Molecular Ecology, Wiley, Vol. 30, No. 16 ( 2021-08), p. 3965-3973
Abstract:
Due to its central importance to many aspects of evolutionary biology and population genetics, the long‐term effective population size ( N e ) has been estimated for numerous species and populations. However, estimating contemporary N e is difficult and in practice this parameter is often unknown. In principle, contemporary N e can be estimated using either analyses of temporal changes in allele frequencies, or the extent of linkage disequilibrium (LD) between unlinked markers. We applied these approaches to estimate contemporary N e of a relatively recently founded island population of collared flycatchers ( Ficedula albicollis ). We sequenced the genomes of 85 birds sampled in 1993 and 2015, and applied several temporal methods to estimate N e at a few thousand (4000–7000). The approach based on LD provided higher estimates of N e (20,000–32,000) and was associated with high variance, often resulting in infinite N e . We conclude that whole‐genome sequencing data offers new possibilities to estimate high ( 〉 1000) contemporary N e , but also note that such estimates remain challenging, in particular for LD‐based methods for contemporary N e estimation.
Type of Medium:
Online Resource
ISSN:
0962-1083
,
1365-294X
Language:
English
Publisher:
Wiley
Publication Date:
2021
detail.hit.zdb_id:
2020749-9
detail.hit.zdb_id:
1126687-9
SSG:
12
