Confounding between recombination and selection, and the Ped/Pop method for detecting selection

Abstract

In recent years, there have been major developments of population genetics methods to estimate both rates of recombination and levels of natural selection. However, genomic variants subject to positive selection are likely to have arisen recently and, consequently, had less opportunity to be affected by recombination. Thus, the two processes have an intimately related impact on genetic variation, and inference of either may be vulnerable to confounding by the other. We illustrate here that even modest levels of positive selection can substantially reduce population-based recombination rate estimates. We also show that genome-wide scans to detect loci under recent selection in humans have ten..