On the frequency of undetectable recombination events

Abstract

Simple analytical results show that many recombination events occur in such a way as to have no effect on the resultant DNA sequence. The proportion of these undetectable events depends on the population size, mutation rate and recombination rate and is quite large for reasonable values of these quantities. Efforts to estimate recombination rates and frequencies directly from DNA sequence data must, thereefore, take this undetectable fraction into account.