No Arabic abstract
We consider the Moran model in continuous time with two types, mutation, and selection. We concentrate on the ancestral line and its stationary type distribution. Building on work by Fearnhead (J. Appl. Prob. 39 (2002), 38-54) and Taylor (Electron. J. Probab. 12 (2007), 808-847), we characterise this distribution via the fixation probability of the offspring of all individuals of favourable type (regardless of the offsprings types). We concentrate on a finite population and stay with the resulting discrete setting all the way through. This way, we extend previous results and gain new insight into the underlying particle picture.
In a (two-type) Wright-Fisher diffusion with directional selection and two-way mutation, let $x$ denote todays frequency of the beneficial type, and given $x$, let $h(x)$ be the probability that, among all individuals of todays population, the individual whose progeny will eventually take over in the population is of the beneficial type. Fearnhead [Fearnhead, P., 2002. The common ancestor at a nonneutral locus. J. Appl. Probab. 39, 38-54] and Taylor [Taylor, J. E., 2007. The common ancestor process for a Wright-Fisher diffusion. Electron. J. Probab. 12, 808-847] obtained a series representation for $h(x)$. We develop a construction that contains elements of both the ancestral selection graph and the lookdown construction and includes pruning of certain lines upon mutation. Besides being interesting in its own right, this construction allows a transparent derivation of the series coefficients of $h(x)$ and gives them a probabilistic meaning.
We define the Sampled Moran Genealogy Process, a continuous-time Markov process on the space of genealogies with the demography of the classical Moran process, sampled through time. To do so, we begin by defining the Moran Genealogy Process using a novel representation. We then extend this process to include sampling through time. We derive exact conditional and marginal probability distributions for the sampled process under a stationarity assumption, and an exact expression for the likelihood of any sequence of genealogies it generates. This leads to some interesting observations pertinent to existing phylodynamic methods in the literature. Throughout, our proofs are original and make use of strictly forward-in-time calculations and are exact for all population sizes and sampling processes.
We revisit the spatial ${lambda}$-Fleming-Viot process introduced in [1]. Particularly, we are interested in the time $T_0$ to the most recent common ancestor for two lineages. We distinguish between the case where the process acts on the entire two-dimensional plane, and on a finite rectangle. Utilizing a differential equation linking $T_0$ with the physical distance between the lineages, we arrive at simple and reasonably accurate approximation schemes for both cases. Furthermore, our analysis enables us to address the question of whether the genealogical process of the model comes down from infinity, which has been partly answered before in [2].
The evolutionary process has been modelled in many ways using both stochastic and deterministic models. We develop an algebraic model of evolution in a population of asexually reproducing organisms in which we represent a stochastic walk in phenotype space, constrained to the edges of an underlying graph representing the genotype, with a time-homogeneous Markov Chain. We show its equivalence to a more standard, explicit stochastic model and show the algebraic models superiority in computational efficiency. Because of this increase in efficiency, we offer the ability to simulate the evolution of much larger populations in more realistic genotype spaces. Further, we show how the algebraic properties of the Markov Chain model can give insight into the evolutionary process and allow for analysis using familiar linear algebraic methods.
Duality plays an important role in population genetics. It can relate results from forwards-in-time models of allele frequency evolution with those of backwards-in-time genealogical models; a well known example is the duality between the Wright-Fisher diffusion for genetic drift and its genealogical counterpart, the coalescent. There have been a number of articles extending this relationship to include other evolutionary processes such as mutation and selection, but little has been explored for models also incorporating crossover recombination. Here, we derive from first principles a new genealogical process which is dual to a Wright-Fisher diffusion model of drift, mutation, and recombination. Our approach is based on expressing a putative duality relationship between two models via their infinitesimal generators, and then seeking an appropriate test function to ensure the validity of the duality equation. This approach is quite general, and we use it to find dualities for several important variants, including both a discrete L-locus model of a gene and a continuous model in which mutation and recombination events are scattered along the gene according to continuous distributions. As an application of our results, we derive a series expansion for the transition function of the diffusion. Finally, we study in further detail the case in which mutation is absent. Then the dual process describes the dispersal of ancestral genetic material across the ancestors of a sample. The stationary distribution of this process is of particular interest; we show how duality relates this distribution to haplotype fixation probabilities. We develop an efficient method for computing such probabilities in multilocus models.