Skip to main content
Genetics logoLink to Genetics
. 1983 Nov;105(3):767–779. doi: 10.1093/genetics/105.3.767

Estimation of the Coancestry Coefficient: Basis for a Short-Term Genetic Distance

John Reynolds 1, B S Weir 1, C Clark Cockerham 1
PMCID: PMC1202185  PMID: 17246175

Abstract

A distance measure for populations diverging by drift only is based on the coancestry coefficient θ, and three estimators of the distance D = -ln(1 - θ) are constructed for multiallelic, multilocus data. Simulations of a monoecious population mating at random showed that a weighted ratio of single-locus estimators performed better than an unweighted average or a least squares estimator. Jackknifing over loci provided satisfactory variance estimates of distance values. In the drift situation, in which mutation is excluded, the weighted estimator of D appears to be a better measure of distance than others that have appeared in the literature.

Full Text

The Full Text of this article is available as a PDF (638.4 KB).

Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

  1. Nei M., Roychoudhury A. K. Sampling variances of heterozygosity and genetic distance. Genetics. 1974 Feb;76(2):379–390. doi: 10.1093/genetics/76.2.379. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
  2. Nei M. The theory of genetic distance and evolution of human races. Jinrui Idengaku Zasshi. 1978 Dec;23(4):341–369. doi: 10.1007/BF01908190. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

Articles from Genetics are provided here courtesy of Oxford University Press

RESOURCES