A Review of Coalescent Genealogy of Populations
Claire Umstead · Murray State's Digital Commons (Murray State University) · 2018
Coalescent theory of genetics is a theory that can help determine the relationship between different forms of the same genes (alleles) and their ancestral copies. Coalescence helps us describe how recently two individuals in a population had a most recent common ancestor, and it can tell us when in an ancestral history an allele generated. This theory has a variety of applications in disease gene mapping, polymorphism, and evolutionary theory. There are several equations that go into this theory of population genetics, the foundation of which was developed by John Kingman in the 1980s. The presentation will discuss Kingman’s contributions to coalescent theory and how it has been developed for our utilization today.