Breadcrumb
Investigating the effect of selection on the genealogical tree
Supervisor: Feng Yu
Theme: Applied Probability
Selection within a population can drastically change the coalescence times (i.e. at what time in the past one can find the common ancestor of 2, 3, 4, ... randomly chosen individuals from a population) as a function of population size. Recent work on a model involving "artificial" selection (where the fittest individuals are guaranteed to produce offspring, rather than natural selection where fitter individuals have higher probability of producing offspring), the coalescence time scales like powers of (log population_size). There are reasons to believe for {\em natural} selection, which is the subject of interest for most biologists, the coalescent times display similar behaviour. The goal of this project is to extend the consideration of the artificial selection model to certain natural selection models. This is an area where there are little results at present.