By far the greatest challenge for diversity studies is to characterize the diversity of prokaryotes, which probably encompasses billions of species, most of which are unculturable. Recent advances in theory and analysis have focused on multi-locus approaches and on combined analysis of molecular and ecological data. However, broad environmental surveys of bacterial diversity still rely on singl...

OBJECTIVE To establish a better method determining three Y-STR loci. METHODS A multiplex of Y-STRs and amplify simultaneously three Y-STRs loci. RESULTS Establish successfully a multiplexing system of three Y-STR loci (DYS390, DYS391 and DYS393) followed by a population genetic study of Han population in Chengdu, China. CONCLUSION The diversity of haplotype is 0.8965, the value of discrim...

Singapore is a small island-nation situated at the tip of the Malay Peninsular in Southeast Asia. It existed as a British colony from 1819 to 1959, interspersed by a period of Japanese occupation from 1942 to 1945 during World War II. Throughout its colonial history, Singapore has been the recipient of extensive immigration from various parts of Asia, and the same diversity is still reflected i...

The Genetic Society of America's Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal is awarded to an individual GSA member for lifetime achievement in the field of genetics. For over 40 years, 2015 recipient Brian Charlesworth has been a leader in both theoretical and empirical evolutionary genetics, making substantial contributions to our understanding of how evolution acts on genetic variation. Some of the areas in wh...

The coalescent is an accumulation of waiting times. We can think of it as standard queuing process where the times are exponentially distributed with rate k(k − 1)/(2 × 2N) [for most elaboration in this chapter I use the Wright-Fisher model as a guide, for the Moran model the rate would be k(k−1)/(2× (2N)2) ]. The coalescent makes no assumptions about the interaction of the intervals, we will a...

Morph frequencies of three related polymorphisms were determined in ten natural populations of Drosophila pseudoobscura. They are the well-known inversion polymorphism of the third chromosome and the polymorphism for a-amylase produced by the structural gene A m y (which resides on the third chromosome). The third polymorphism was for tissue-specific expression of A m y in adult midguts; a tota...

The key findings of classical population genetics are derived using a framework based on information theory using the entropies of the allele frequency distribution as a basis. The common results for drift, mutation, selection, and gene flow will be rewritten both in terms of information theoretic measurements and used to draw the classic conclusions for balance conditions and common features o...

Recent work has shown that expression level is the main predictor of a gene's evolutionary rate and that more highly expressed genes evolve slower. A possible explanation for this observation is selection for proteins that fold properly despite mistranslation, in short selection for translational robustness. Translational robustness leads to the somewhat paradoxical prediction that highly expre...

To understand inferences based on sampling random relationships among a small sample of individuals of a contemporary population we need to know some basic models of population history. Several such models exist. Fisher (1929, and 1930) and Wright (1931) developed independently a simple population model. We call this model the Wright-Fisher population model. Alternatives are the Moran model, de...

The comparison of genetic divergence or genetic distances, estimated by pairwise FST and related statistics, with geographical distances by Mantel test is one of the most popular approaches to evaluate spatial processes driving population structure. There have been, however, recent criticisms and discussions on the statistical performance of the Mantel test. Simultaneously, alternative framewor...