Lecture notes in population genetics – consolidated PDF now available

On Saturday afternoon I published a consolidated PDF containing the updated notes from EEB 5348 on Figshare: https://figshare.com/articles/Lecture_notes_in_population_genetics/100687 . Since the notes are on Figshare, they also have a DOI (10.6084/m9.figshare.100687.v3) and they are citable, should you choose to do so. You’ll notice a “.v3” at the end of the DOI string. That’s because this is version 3 of the notes. You can find the LaTeX source and accompanying EPS files at Github. The overview page for the notes is at https://kholsinger.github.io/Lecture-Notes-in-Population-Genetics/ and the notes for this release are at https://github.com/kholsinger/Lecture-Notes-in-Population-Genetics/releases/tag/v3.0 . Links to all three releases are available at https://github.com/kholsinger/Lecture-Notes-in-Population-Genetics/releases . I hope you find the notes useful. If you find any errors or find anything confusing, please let me know, and I’ll do my best to correct the problem.

Please note that I’ve released these notes under a CC BY 4.0 license. Feel free to use or modify them consistent with the terms of that license. If you do make changes, though, I’d appreciate hearing about them. There’s a decent chance that I’ll incorporate them into my notes – with proper attribution of course.

Rare variants and genomic prediction

One thing I didn’t mention in the notes for Thursday’s lecture is that it is difficult to detect the effect of loci where one variant is rare, both because there’s a good chance you won’t have the variant in your sample (unless your sample is very large) and because it’s difficult to detect an effect when only a small number of individuals show it. The most recent Nature has a news article highlighting the challenge using our favorite polygenic trait, height in humans.

Genetic study homes in on height’s heritability mystery