Estimation of the coancestry coefficient: basis for a short-term genetic distance.

A distance measure for populations diverging by drift only is based on the coancestry coefficient theta, and three estimators of the distance D = -ln(1 - theta) are constructed for multiallelic, multilocus data. Simulations of a monoecious population mating at random showed that a weighted ratio of single-locus estimators performed better than an unweighted average or a least squares estimator. Jackknifing over loci provided satisfactory variance estimates of distance values. In the drift situation, in which mutation is excluded, the weighted estimator of D appears to be a better measure of distance than others that have appeared in the literature.