Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biolgical Informatics FY 2006

Novembre, John, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

Project Title: "Developing a population clustering method that accounts for spatial variation within subpopulations" This project is awarded under the Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Biological Informatics Program for 2006. Population subdivision is a fundamental factor affecting ecological and evolutionary dynamics. As a result of its importance, methods for describing subdivision are of immense interest. Furthermore, as large-scale genetic datasets with finer spatial sampling become more common, approaches that integrate spatial and genomic data jointly will become increasingly useful for describing population subdivision. The proposed research will contribute to this field by establishing a flexible statistical framework for ddressing spatial patterns of genetic variation within and between populations. In particular, the proposed research will address the problem of clustering individuals into multiple, potentially spatially overlapping populations within which allele frequencies vary smoothly across space. Including spatial variation in the model should improve the accuracy of inferred clusters, improve assessments of certainty in the clusterings, produce more detailed summaries of variation within clusters, and improve the interpretability of clustering results. Once developed, the tool will be applied for the tasks of improving the understanding of human population structure and improving the identification of the geographic origin of ivory samples from African elephants. The research project will form the core part of the postdoctoral training experience. The research will be carried out in the lab of Dr. Matthew Stephens at the University of Chicago where the Fellow will expand his training in population genetics of geographic variation to include mathematical and computational concepts and applications.