Introduction

We introduce a flexible and robust simulation-based framework to infer demographic parameters from the site frequency spectrum (SFS) computed on large genomic datasets. We show that our composite-likelihood approach allows one to study evolutionary models of arbitrary complexity, which cannot be tackled by other current likelihood-based methods. For simple scenarios, our approach compares favorably in terms of accuracy and speed with ∂a∂i, the current reference in the field, while showing better convergence properties for complex models. We first apply our methodology to non-coding genomic SNP data from four human populations. To infer their demographic history, we compare neutral evolutionary models of increasing complexity, including unsampled populations. We further show the versatility of our framework by extending it to the inference of demographic parameters from SNP chips with known ascertainment, such as that recently released by Affymetrix to study human origins. Whereas previous ways of handling ascertained SNPs were either restricted to a single population or only allowed the inference of divergence time between a pair of populations, our framework can correctly infer parameters of more complex models including the divergence of several populations, bottlenecks and migration. We apply this approach to the reconstruction of African demography using two distinct ascertained human SNP panels studied under two evolutionary models. The two SNP panels lead to globally very similar estimates and confidence intervals, and suggest an ancient divergence (>110 Ky) between Yoruba and San populations. Our methodology appears well suited to the study of complex scenarios from large genomic data sets.

Publications

  1. Robust demographic inference from genomic and SNP data.
    Cite this
    Excoffier L, Dupanloup I, Huerta-Sánchez E, Sousa VC, Foll M, 2013-10-01 - PLoS genetics
  2. fastsimcoal: a continuous-time coalescent simulator of genomic diversity under arbitrarily complex evolutionary scenarios.
    Cite this
    Excoffier L, Foll M, 2011-05-01 - Bioinformatics (Oxford, England)

Credits

  1. Laurent Excoffier
    Developer

    CMPG, Institute of Ecology and Evolution, Switzerland

  2. Isabelle Dupanloup
    Developer

  3. Emilia Huerta-Sánchez
    Developer

  4. Vitor C Sousa
    Developer

  5. Matthieu Foll
    Investigator

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Summary
AccessionBT001496
Tool TypeApplication
Category
PlatformsLinux/Unix
TechnologiesC++
User InterfaceTerminal Command Line
Download Count0
Submitted ByMatthieu Foll