scholarly journals Recent effective population size in Eastern European plain Russians correlates with the key historical events

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ural Yunusbaev ◽  
Arslan Ionusbaev ◽  
Giyoun Han ◽  
Hyung Wook Kwon

Abstract Effective population size reflects the history of population growth, contraction, and structuring. When the effect of structuring is negligible, the inferred trajectory of the effective population size can be informative about the key events in the history of a population. We used the IBDNe and DoRIS approaches, which exploit the data on IBD sharing between genomes, to reconstruct the recent effective population size in two population datasets of Russians from Eastern European plain: (1) ethnic Russians sampled from the westernmost part of Russia; (2) ethnic Russians, Bashkirs, and Tatars sampled from the Volga-Ural region. In this way, we examined changes in effective population size among ethnic Russians that reside in their historical area at the West of the plain, and that expanded eastward to come into contact with the indigenous peoples at the East of the plain. We compared the inferred demographic trajectories of each ethnic group to written historical data related to demographic events such as migration, war, colonization, famine, establishment, and collapse of empires. According to IBDNe estimations, 200 generations (~6000 years) ago, the effective size of the ancestral populations of Russians, Bashkirs, and Tatars hovered around 3,000, 30,000, and 8,000 respectively. Then, the ethnic Russians exponentially grew with increasing rates for the last 115 generations and become the largest ethnic group of the plain. Russians do not show any drop in effective population size after the key historical conflicts, including the Mongol invasion. The only exception is a moderate drop in the 17th century, which is well known in Russian history as The Smuta. Our analyses suggest a more eventful recent population history for the two small ethnic groups that came into contact with ethnic Russians in the Volga-Ural region. We found that the effective population size of Bashkirs and Tatars started to decrease during the time of the Mongol invasion. Interestingly, there is an even stronger drop in the effective population size that coincides with the expansion of Russians to the East. Thus, 15–20 generations ago, i.e. in the 16–18th centuries in the trajectories of Bashkirs and Tatars, we observe the bottlenecks of four and twenty thousand, respectively. Our results on the recent effective population size correlate with the key events in the history of populations of the Eastern European plain and have importance for designing biomedical studies in the region.

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Hawks

AbstractHuman populations have a complex history of introgression and of changing population size. Human genetic variation has been affected by both these processes, so that inference of past population size depends upon the pattern of gene flow and introgression among past populations. One remarkable aspect of human population history as inferred from genetics is a consistent “wave” of larger effective population size, prior to the bottlenecks and expansions of the last 100,000 years. Here I carry out a series of simulations to investigate how introgression and gene flow from genetically divergent ancestral populations affect the inference of ancestral effective population size. Both introgression and gene flow from an extinct, genetically divergent population consistently produce a wave in the history of inferred effective population size. The time and amplitude of the wave reflect the time of origin of the genetically divergent ancestral populations and the strength of introgression or gene flow. These results demonstrate that even small fractions of introgression or gene flow from ancient populations may have large effects on the inference of effective population size.


2011 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marta Melé ◽  
Asif Javed ◽  
Marc Pybus ◽  
Pierre Zalloua ◽  
Marc Haber ◽  
...  

2010 ◽  
Vol 107 (5) ◽  
pp. 2147-2152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chad D. Huff ◽  
Jinchuan Xing ◽  
Alan R. Rogers ◽  
David Witherspoon ◽  
Lynn B. Jorde

The genealogies of different genetic loci vary in depth. The deeper the genealogy, the greater the chance that it will include a rare event, such as the insertion of a mobile element. Therefore, the genealogy of a region that contains a mobile element is on average older than that of the rest of the genome. In a simple demographic model, the expected time to most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) is doubled if a rare insertion is present. We test this expectation by examining single nucleotide polymorphisms around polymorphic Alu insertions from two completely sequenced human genomes. The estimated TMRCA for regions containing a polymorphic insertion is two times larger than the genomic average (P < <10−30), as predicted. Because genealogies that contain polymorphic mobile elements are old, they are shaped largely by the forces of ancient population history and are insensitive to recent demographic events, such as bottlenecks and expansions. Remarkably, the information in just two human DNA sequences provides substantial information about ancient human population size. By comparing the likelihood of various demographic models, we estimate that the effective population size of human ancestors living before 1.2 million years ago was 18,500, and we can reject all models where the ancient effective population size was larger than 26,000. This result implies an unusually small population for a species spread across the entire Old World, particularly in light of the effective population sizes of chimpanzees (21,000) and gorillas (25,000), which each inhabit only one part of a single continent.


Genes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 1236
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Hempel ◽  
Michael V. Westbury ◽  
José H. Grau ◽  
Alexandra Trinks ◽  
Johanna L. A. Paijmans ◽  
...  

Since the 19th century, the addax (Addax nasomaculatus) has lost approximately 99% of its former range. Along with its close relatives, the blue antelope (Hippotragus leucophaeus) and the scimitar-horned oryx (Oryx dammah), the addax may be the third large African mammal species to go extinct in the wild in recent times. Despite this, the evolutionary history of this critically endangered species remains virtually unknown. To gain insight into the population history of the addax, we used hybridization capture to generate ten complete mitochondrial genomes from historical samples and assembled a nuclear genome. We found that both mitochondrial and nuclear diversity are low compared to other African bovids. Analysis of mitochondrial genomes revealed a most recent common ancestor ~32 kya (95% CI 11–58 kya) and weak phylogeographic structure, indicating that the addax likely existed as a highly mobile, panmictic population across its Sahelo–Saharan range in the past. PSMC analysis revealed a continuous decline in effective population size since ~2 Ma, with short intermediate increases at ~500 and ~44 kya. Our results suggest that the addax went through a major bottleneck in the Late Pleistocene, remaining at low population size prior to the human disturbances of the last few centuries.


Author(s):  
Bruce Walsh ◽  
Michael Lynch

The effects of genetic drift usually assume an idealized population of constant size. This chapter shows how the population size for such an idealized population can be replaced with an effective population size for populations with age structure, unequal sex ratios, a history of expansion or contraction, inbreeding, and population subdivision. These demographic features impact the entire genome more or less equally. A relatively recent understanding is that selection at a site can dramatically reduce the local effective population size experienced by nearby linked sites (the Hill-Robertson effect). This can arise from background selection to remove deleterious new mutations or from selective sweeps wherein favorable new mutations are driven toward fixation. The Hill-Robertson effect is a general way to describe the fact that selection at a site makes selection are other linked sites less efficient, and, therefore, more neutral. This chapter discusses the implications of this finding for genome structure.


Genetics ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 163 (4) ◽  
pp. 1389-1401 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard E Broughton ◽  
Richard G Harrison

Abstract Population genetics theory predicts that genetic drift should eliminate shared polymorphism, leading to monophyly or exclusivity of populations, when the elapsed time between lineage-splitting events is large relative to effective population size. We examined patterns of nucleotide variation in introns at four nuclear loci to relate processes affecting the history of genes to patterns of divergence among natural populations and species. Ancestral polymorphisms were shared among three recognized species, Gryllus firmus, G. pennsylvanicus, and G. ovisopis, and genealogical patterns suggest that successive speciation events occurred recently and rapidly relative to effective population size. High levels of shared polymorphism among these morphologically, behaviorally, and ecologically distinct species indicate that only a small fraction of the genome needs to become differentiated for speciation to occur. Among the four nuclear gene loci there was a 10-fold range in nucleotide diversity, and patterns of polymorphism and divergence suggest that natural selection has acted to maintain or eliminate variation at some loci. While nuclear gene genealogies may have limited applications in phylogeography or other approaches dependent on population monophyly, they provide important insights into the historical, demographic, and selective forces that shape speciation.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bhavin S. Khatri ◽  
Austin Burt

Estimating recent effective population size is of great importance in characterising and predicting the evolution of natural populations. Methods based on nucleotide diversity may underestimate current day effective population sizes due to historical bottlenecks, whilst methods that reconstruct demographic history typically only detect long-term variations. However, soft selective sweeps, which leave a fingerprint of mutational history by recurrent mutations on independent haplotype backgrounds, holds promise of an estimate more representative of recent population history. Here we present a simple and robust method of estimation based only on knowledge of the number of independent recurrent origins and the current frequency of the beneficial allele in a population sample, independent of the strength of selection and age of the mutation. Using a forward time theoretical framework, we show the mean number of origins is a function of θ = 2Nμ and current allele frequency, through a simple equation, and the distribution is approximately Poisson. This estimate is robust to whether mutants pre-existed before selection arose, and is equally accurate for diploid populations with incomplete dominance. For fast (e.g., seasonal) demographic changes compared to time scale for fixation of the mutant allele, and for moderate peak-to-trough ratios, we show our constant population size estimate can be used to bound the maximum and minimum population size. Applied to the Vgsc gene of Anopheles gambiae, we estimate an effective population size of roughly 6 × 107, and including seasonal demographic oscillations, a minimum effective population size greater than 6 × 106 and a maximum less than 3 × 109.


Author(s):  
Andy Foote ◽  
Rebecca Hooper ◽  
Alana Alexander ◽  
Robin Baird ◽  
Charles Baker ◽  
...  

Runs of homozygosity (ROH) occur when offspring inherit haplotypes that are identical by descent from each parent. Length distributions of ROH are informative about population history; specifically the probability of inbreeding mediated by mating system and/or population demography. Here, we investigate whether variation in killer whale (Orcinus orca) demographic history is reflected in genome-wide heterozygosity and ROH length distributions, using a global dataset of 26 genomes representative of geographic and ecotypic variation in this species, and two F1 admixed individuals with Pacific-Atlantic parentage. We first reconstruct demographic history for each population as changes in effective population size through time using the pairwise sequential Markovian coalescent (PSMC) method. We find a subset of populations declined in effective population size during the Late Pleistocene, while others had more stable demography. Genomes inferred to have undergone ancestral declines in effective population size, were autozygous at hundreds of short ROH (<1Mb), reflecting high background relatedness due to coalescence of haplotypes deep within the pedigree. In contrast, longer and therefore younger ROH (>1.5 Mb) were found in low latitude populations and populations of known conservation concern, including a Scottish population, for which 37.8% of the autosomes comprised of ROH >1.5 Mb in length.


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