The age of a unique event polymorphism

Abstract

We develop a Markov chain Monte Carlo approach for estimating the distribution of the age of a mutation that is assumed to have arisen just once in the history of the population of interest. We assume that in addition to the presence or absence of this mutation in a sample of chromosomes, we have DNA sequence data from a region completely linked to the mutant site. We apply our method to a mitochondrial data set in which the DNA sequence data come from hypervariable region I and the mutation of interest is the 9-bp region V deletion.