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Abstract With up to millions of nearly neutral polymorphisms now being routinely sampled in population-genomic surveys, it is possible to estimate the site-frequency spectrum of such sites with high precision. Each frequency class reflects a mixture of potentially unique demographic histories, which can be revealed using theory for the probability distributions of the starting and ending points of branch segments over all possible coalescence trees. Such distributions are completely independent of past population history, which only influences the segment lengths, providing the basis for estimating average population sizes separating tree-wide coalescence events. The history of population-size change experienced by a sample of polymorphisms can then be dissected in a model-flexible fashion, and extension of this theory allows estimation of the mean and full distribution of long-term effective population sizes and ages of alleles of specific frequencies. Here, we outline the basic theory underlying the conceptual approach, develop and test an efficient statistical procedure for parameter estimation, and apply this to multiple population-genomic datasets for the microcrustacean Daphnia pulex. 

Abstract Although the analysis of linkage disequilibrium (LD) plays a central role in many areas of population genetics, the sampling variance of LD is known to be very large with high sensitivity to numbers of nucleotide sites and individuals sampled. Here we show that a genome-wide analysis of the distribution of heterozygous sites within a single diploid genome can yield highly informative patterns of LD as a function of physical distance. The proposed statistic, the correlation of zygosity, is closely related to the conventional population-level measure of LD, but is agnostic with respect to allele frequencies and hence likely less prone to outlier artifacts. Application of the method to several vertebrate species leads to the conclusion that >80% of recombination events are typically resolved by gene-conversion-like processes unaccompanied by crossovers, with the average lengths of conversion patches being on the order of one to several kilobases in length. Thus, contrary to common assumptions, the recombination rate between sites does not scale linearly with distance, often even up to distances of 100 kb. In addition, the amount of LD between sites separated by <200 bp is uniformly much greater than can be explained by the conventional neutral model, possibly because of the nonindependent origin of mutations within this spatial scale. These results raise questions about the application of conventional population-genetic interpretations to LD on short spatial scales and also about the use of spatial patterns of LD to infer demographic histories.