Using DNA to Find Populations History of groups

Using DNA to Find Population History of Groups

Summary:
Professor Jonathan Pritchard and Joseph Prickell has combined both methods from evolutionary biology and statistics in an attempt to develop a general method to predict gene flow between different groups in he same species. He describes this method as a software model that has been developed so inferences could be made to a populations history and their interactions with each other in species. This type of concept is all based on modern DNA knowledge. Jonathan says that making a tree of inter-specie history always has a possibility of having interbreeding populations. The software has been developed and is called "TreeMix", which compares how often variants of a certain gene from separate populations can appear in the same specie. Pritchard has tested this software with 55 human and 82 dog populations. His TreeMix graphs look less like trees due to the interbreeding of populations. Other groups of researchers have used TreeMix as well, for example one group has used it to show a link between two populations of neanderthals, the Denisovans and the Papuans. These two populations live in different areas, but still inter-breed. This leads scientists to another question of how exactly did they migrate and change over time

Relevance:
The relevance of this article to our current term of Biology is evolution. For example the TreeMix software is used to see how populations interacted and evolved with each other. The tree-like structure it generates is similar to a cladogram in many ways. This is just a new way of looking at evolution and relationships between organisms. Instead of different species, TreeMix looks at the even finer detail of different populations.

Siting:

URL: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130109151156.htm
Publisher: ScienceDaily
Author:  Matt Wood
Date of Publication: January 9, 2013