Genome Sciences 590

Evolution and Population Genetics Seminar

Autumn Quarter, 2002

topic: COALESCENTS

Tuesdays in J182 Health Sciences Building
12:30pm - 1:20pm.

(the first session will be in the SECOND week
of the quarter as I will be away the first week)

We will cover the theory of the coalescent in population genetics, how evolutionary forces affect it, and how it is used in inferring population and genetic parameters. Students in the course will be expected to lead one of these sessions, to do all readings, and to participate actively. The course will expend on the coverage of coalescents in Genetics 562 (Theoretical Population Genetics) and Genetics 570 (Phylogenetic Inference).

Topics

References will be listed here for each session. When a reference can be accessed by web from the UW, a link will be given here (note that it may not work from home, as you might not be recognized as being covered by the UW's subscription to an electronic journal). For the others distribution arrangements will be made in class. The references marked with asterisks (*) are the ones we will be covering most closely in each class.


October 8

Kingman's coalescent and its predecessors

I will lead this session and explain the material. The fundamental papers of Kingman, which we will not read in detail, are

A paper giving some useful methods that can be used to get close to the coalescent is my own 1971 paper (which at the time I did not think of using to derive anything like the coalescent):

Felsenstein, J. 1971. The rate of loss of multiple alleles in finite haploid populations. Theoretical Population Biology 2: 391-403.

In this session, we will use as our basic text a preliminary version of the chapter on Coalescents from my forthcoming book Inferring Phylogenies, to be published in 2003 by Sinauer Associates. Click here to download a PDF of the first part of that chapter. If your browser does not have a PDF reader plugin, you should be able to use Save As to save the garbage that appears into a file called, say chap26a.pdf and then use a PDF reader on that.


October 15

Coalescents with population growth


October 22

Coalescents with migration


October 29

Recombination and coalescents


November 5

Coalescents and speciation


November 12

"Single-tree" inference methods


November 19

MCMC and Importance Sampling likelihood methods (I)


November 26

MCMC and Importance Sampling likelihood methods (II)


December 3

Natural selection and coalescents I


December 10

Natural selection and coalescents II


Joe Felsenstein ( joe@gs.washington.edu )