| Full Sibling Reconstruction in Wild Populations From Microsatellite Genetic Markers (2009) | |||||||||||||||
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| I do not believe that the accident of birth makes people sisters and brothers. It makes them siblings. Gives them mutuality of parentage.. – Maya Angelou New technologies for collecting genotypic data from natural populations open the possibilities of investigating many fundamental biological phenomena, including behavior, mating systems, heritabilities of adaptive traits, kin selection, and dispersal patterns. The power and potential of genotypic information often rests in the ability to reconstruct genealogical relationships among individuals. These relationships include parentage, full and half-sibships, and higher order aspects of pedigrees. Some areas of genealogical inference, such as parentage, have been studied extensively. Although methods for pedigree inference and kinship analysis exist, most make assumptions that do not hold for wild populations of animals and plants. In this chapter, we focus on the full sibling relationship and first review existing methods for full sibship reconstructions from microsatellite genetic markers. We then describe our new combinatorial methods for sibling reconstruction based on simple Mendelian laws and its extension even in the presence of errors in the data. We also describe a generic consensus method for combining sibling reconstruction results from other methods. We present experimental comparison of the best existing approaches on both biological and simulated data. We discuss relative merits and drawbacks of existing methods and suggest a practical approach for reconstructing sibling relationships in wild populations. 1 | |||||||||||||||
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