Molecular ecological studies are often characterised by an extremely high number of samples and by an equal high number of molecular analyses to whom the samples have been subjected. The analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) is a powerful statistical method for the description of factors influencing the structure of populations. AMOVA has been applied to different biological systems, trying to...

In the past ten years, there has been an expansion of scientific interest in population genetics linked to both understanding histories of human migration and the way that population difference and diversity may account for and/or be implicated in health and disease. In this article, I examine how particular aspects of a globalizing research agenda related to population differences and genetic ...

The phylogenetic and ecological complexity of microbial communities necessitates the development of new methods to determine whether two or more communities have the same structure even though it is not possible to sample the communities exhaustively. To address this need, we adapted a method used in population genetics, the parsimony test, to determine the relatedness of communities. Here we d...

Due to the dimension and the dependency structure of genetic data, composite likelihood methods have found their natural place in the statistical methodology involving such data. After a brief description of the type of data one encounters in population genetic studies, we introduce the questions of interest concerning the main genetic parameters in population genetics, and present an up-to-dat...

Since Darwin first noted the impact of past ice ages on the distribution of organisms, biogeographers have debated whether Pleistocene glaciations shaped evolutionary patterns. A new synthesis of population genetics and palaeoclimatology promises unprecedented insights into Pleistocene evolutionary history.

Coalescent theory represents the most significant progress in theoretical population genetics in the past two decades of this century. It is now widely recognized as a cornerstone for rigorous statistical analyses of molecular data from populations. In the future, challenges from the rapidly expanding body of molecular data will continue to inject fresh blood into the development of coalescent ...

Article history: Received 9 March 2014 Accepted 21 May 2014 Available online 7 June 2014 Submitted by R. Brualdi MSC: 17D92 17D99 60J10

Many key bacterial pathogens are frequently carried asymptomatically, and the emergence and spread of these opportunistic pathogens can be driven, or mitigated, via demographic changes within the host population. These inter-host transmission dynamics combine with basic evolutionary parameters such as rates of mutation and recombination, population size and selection, to shape the genetic diver...

Many introduced species become invasive despite genetic bottlenecks that should, in theory, decrease the chances of invasion success. By contrast, population genetic bottlenecks have been hypothesized to increase the invasion success of unicolonial ants by increasing the genetic similarity between descendent populations, thus promoting co-operation. We investigated these alternate hypotheses in...