TY - JOUR AU - Kronholm, Ilkka AU - Loudet, Olivier AU - de Meaux, Juliette PY - 2010 DA - 2010/05/01 TI - Influence of mutation rate on estimators of genetic differentiation - lessons from Arabidopsis thaliana JO - BMC Genetics SP - 33 VL - 11 IS - 1 AB - The analysis of molecular variation within and between populations is crucial to establish strategies for conservation as well as to detect the footprint of spatially heterogeneous selection. The traditional estimator of genetic differentiation (FST) has been shown to be misleading if genetic diversity is high. Alternative estimators of FSThave been proposed, but their robustness to variation in mutation rate is not clearly established. We first investigated the effect of mutation and migration rate using computer simulations and examined their joint influence on QST, a measure of genetic differentiation for quantitative traits. We further used experimental data in natural populations of Arabidopsis thaliana to characterize the effect of mutation rate on various estimates of population differentiation. Since natural species exhibit various degrees of self-fertilisation, we also investigated the effect of mating system on the different estimators. SN - 1471-2156 UR - https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2156-11-33 DO - 10.1186/1471-2156-11-33 ID - Kronholm2010 ER -