The Khon Mueang represent the major group of people present in today's northern Thailand. While linguistic and genetic data seem to support a shared ancestry between Khon Mueang and other Tai-Kadai speaking people, the possibility of an admixed origin with contribution from local Mon-Khmer population could not be ruled out. Previous studies conducted on northern Thai people did not provide a de...

Childwick Trust supported J.E.S and M.M.B. Awards from the Morris Animal Foundation and the United States Department of Agriculture National Research Initiate Competitive Grants (JRM, LJA, LCS, BPC), the Texas Higher Education Board (ARP 010366-0162-2001; BPC), Link Endowment (BPC, LCS), and the Dorothy Russell Havemeyer Foundation (BPC). We also wish to thank Ms Louise Pettit for expert techni...

We characterized nine polymorphic microsatellite (six trinucleotides and three tetranucleotides) loci for the slatey-grey snake (Stegonotus cucullatus) from Australia, in order to study the mating system of this species. Based on a total of 100 samples, the number of alleles per locus ranged from three to 10, and the observed and expected heterozygosities ranged from 0.62 to 0.86 and from 0.53 ...

We present a new approach for estimation of the population-scaled mutation rate, , from microsatellite genotype data, using the recently introduced "product of approximate conditionals" framework. Comparisons with other methods on simulated data demonstrate that this new approach is attractive in terms of both accuracy and speed of computation. Our simulation experiments also demonstrate that, ...