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Modeling Genetic Recombination With Poisson Processes by Jesse Ames '19, Statistics Colloquium

Wed, February 6th, 2019
1:10 pm
- 1:50 pm

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Modeling Genetic Recombination With Poisson Processes by Jesse Ames ’19, Statistics Colloquium, Wednesday, February 6, 1:10 – 1:50 pm, Stetson Court Classroom 105

Abstract:  How can we use genetic data and statistics to learn about human history? Genetic recombination is the exchange of genetic material between chromosomes. Using our biological knowledge of meiosis and crossing over and making a few assumptions, we can treat crossing over as a Poisson process, thereby model recombination as a Poisson process, and derive Haldane’s mapping function. This model allows us to describe the distribution of the number of chromosome segments identical by descent of length x or longer shared between two individuals, conditional on the number of generations to their most recent common ancestor. In turn, this distribution can be inverted to estimate the age of the most recent common ancestor between two individuals.

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