Authors: Steven T Kalinowski
Publish Date: 2009/11/27
Volume: 2, Issue: 1, Pages: 63-66
Abstract
Hybridization with nonnative species is a threat to many taxa but hybrids can be difficult to identify based on morphology Genetic data is useful for estimating the ancestry of admixed populations and diallelic markers such as single nucleotide polymorphisms are popular for such applications When taxa are evolutionarily well diverged loci frequently become fixed for different alleles in each taxa and the degree of genetic admixture between two taxa can be estimated by counting diagnostic alleles for each taxa However when there is hybridization between more than two taxa and loci have only two alleles the origin of each allele cannot be assigned ambiguously to a taxon In this note I show how the expectation–maximization algorithm can be used to solve this problem A computer program for implementing this approach is available at wwwmontanaedu/kalinowski
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