Recent trends in population genetics: More data! More math! Simple models?

Abstract

Recent developments in population genetics are reviewed and placed in a historical context. Current and future challenges, both in computational methodology and in analytical theory, are to develop models and techniques to extract the most information possible from multilocus DNA datasets. As an example of the theoretical issues, five limiting forms of the island model of population subdivision with migration are presented in a unified framework. These approximations illustrate the interplay between migration and drift in structuring gene genealogies, and some of them mike connections between the fairly complicated island-model genealogical process and the much simpler, unstructured neutral coalescent process which underlies most inferential techniques in population genetics.