ANCESTOR: A program to calculate genetic pairwise relatedness and individual inbreeding coefficients

CIPRIOTTI, P.A., A.C. PREMOLI & M.A. AGUIAR

Basic and Applied Genetics

SOCIEDAD ARGENTINA DE GENÉTICA

Año: 2003 p. 69 - 78

1666-0390

In the current context of global changes, as the climatic one or in the land-use, genetic diversity and, therefore the evolutionary potential of the populations could be an important attribute to buffer these changes. In this sense, tools that allow us to describe or quantify the genetic diversity within populations in different environments, help us to develop new techniques for conservation at population level. Knowing the genetic relatedness between pairs of individuals or the inbreeding coefficient of individuals is useful in studies of kin selection, population structure, isolation by distance, spatial autocorrelation, paternity analyses, and mating systems (Ritland, 1996; Sweigart et al., 1999). Although these type of studies are abundant, they mainly focus at the population level and very few use genetic markers to infer population structure at the level of individual organisms (Sweigart et al., 1999). Recently, Ritland (1996) developed a marker-based method for estimating individual inbreeding and pairwise relatedness in natural populations. In this technical report, we present a simple program with the original ideas from Ritland´s work (1996) to calculate two indexes of genetic structure of populations at the individual level. This program, complemented with spatial information can be a powerful tool to build links between genetic and spatial models.