Being able to determine the kinship structure and the relatedness of individuals are important prerequisite to test many models of evolution, Cepaea nemoralis is an ideal model organism for studying these processes because it has a rich history of research, and with its relatively low dispersal ability lends itself to a high degree of local adaptation over small and relatively easily studied areas. During this project we developed molecular markers to in an attempt to genotype of a population of C. nemoralis in Berrow Somerset. There are several methods available to exploit the discriminative power of DNA markers. These methods can be grouped into two main categories: moment estimators and likelihood estimators (Blouin, 2003; Thomas, 2005; Van-de-Casteele et a/., 2001). The aim of this project is to extend earlier methods of estimating relatedness and to model the probable recent pedigrees of a group of individuals purely from genetic information. This approach aims to model the multi locus genealogy back to a certain point in the past, prior to the point where the ancestral genotypes are drawn from an appropriate frequency distribution, in a similar way to (Gasbarra et al., 2006), taking into account genotypic errors. We developed a Moran model of evolution allowing for overlap of generations and different levels of mating fitness in a Bayesian framework with the use of importance sampling based on an algorithm developed by Beaumont (2003), called group importance metropolis-Hastings algorithm.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:553658 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Moreira, Bruno D. |
| Publisher | University of Reading |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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