IPSI12 Introduction to Population Structure Inference

 with Lounès Chikhi and Vitor Sousa

   IMPORTANT DATES for this Course
   Deadline for applications: November 30th 2012
   Latest notification of acceptance: December 5th 2012
   Course date: December 17th - 19th 2012

Candidates with adequate profile will be accepted in the next 72 hours after the application until we reach 20 participants.

http://gtpb.igc.gulbenkian.pt/bicourses/IPSI12/

Overview

Genetic data are increasingly used by ecologists and evolutionary biologists in general. It has thus become important for many biologists with different levels of experience to produce and analyse genetic data. In this short course we shall try to take a practical approach to the analysis of genetic data, but we will also provide some of the theoretical background required to understand the outputs of the software used. This course will be organised so as to mix sessions where important notions are introduced with practicals where freely available software will be used. While this will not be the focus of the course, we will also discuss genealogical (coalescent-based) simulation methods and those based on forward-in-time simulations. Altogether this will allow to discuss the potentialities and limitations of the tools available to the community.

In this three-day course we will introduce the main concepts that underlie many of the population structured models that are frequently used in population genetics. We will focus on the importance of demographic history (e.g. effective sizes and migration patterns) in shaping genetic data. We will go through the basic notions that are central to population genetics, insisting particularly on the statistics used to measure genetic diversity and population differentiation. The course will also cover a short introduction to coalescent theory, Bayesian inference in population genetics and data simulation, as they are connected to what makes landscape genetics today on the basis of multilocus data.

Most theory will be put into practice in practical sessions, analyzing real and/or simulated datasets. In these sessions, we will

(i) look at measures of genetic diversity and differentiation using GENETIX;
(ii) use methods to detect population structure as implemented in the programs GENECLASS2 and STRUCTURE;
(iii) use geneland to detect genetic clusters using spatial information on the sampling locations of individuals, and
(iv) learn how to perform coalescent simulations of genetic data (using SPAms and ms).


Thank you for your interest!     (deadline for applications Nov 30th)