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Coalescent Theory

Definition
AI-generated

Coalescent theory models the backward-in-time merging of gene copies into common ancestors, yielding a stochastic genealogy whose structure depends on effective population size, migration, selection, and recombination.

Topics
Population genetics
Related
Common Ancestor Founder Effect Genetic Bottleneck

Why it matters in GWAS

Coalescent intuition informs IBD segment distributions, phasing and imputation references, rare-variant association calibration, and simulation-based power analyses; complex demography (bottlenecks, expansion, structure) is often fit with coalescent or approximate-coalescent machinery.

Example usage

"Coalescent theory guided demographic simulations used to benchmark observed summary statistics."

Common Ancestor Founder Effect Genetic Bottleneck Identity by Descent (IBD) Population Expansion Relatedness
Related-term network

Click any node to open that term page.

Node order. The current term is first. Next come every page linked from Related terms, in the same top-to-bottom order as that list. Then new terms appear in two-hop layers: for each of those direct neighbors (in that same order), their related terms are appended if not already listed. A third pass does the same for two-hop nodes. The walk stops when a fixed maximum number of nodes is reached.

References

  • Kingman JFC. (1982). The coalescent. Stoch Process Appl.
  • Wakeley J. (2009). Coalescent Theory: An Introduction. Roberts & Company.
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