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Exploring population size changes using SNP frequency spectra

A Corrigendum to this article was published on 27 August 2015

This article has been updated

Abstract

Inferring demographic history is an important task in population genetics. Many existing inference methods are based on predefined simplified population models, which are more suitable for hypothesis testing than exploratory analysis. We developed a novel model-flexible method called stairway plot, which infers changes in population size over time using SNP frequency spectra. This method is applicable for whole-genome sequences of hundreds of individuals. Using extensive simulation, we demonstrate the usefulness of the method for inferring demographic history, especially recent changes in population size. We apply the method to the whole-genome sequence data of 9 populations from the 1000 Genomes Project and show a pattern of fluctuations in human populations from 10,000 to 200,000 years ago.

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Figure 1: Illustration of the multi-epoch model.
Figure 2: Comparing the inferred histories of the stairway plot and the PSMC method using simulated samples on the basis of six different models.
Figure 3: Inferred histories of nine populations.

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Change history

  • 14 August 2015

    In the version of this article initially published, the authors neglected to acknowledge one of the funding sources for their study. The acknowledgements should have recognized support from Chinese NSF grant 91231120 in addition to the other funding sources listed. The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

  • 27 August 2015

    A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/ng0915-1099a

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC; https://www.tacc.utexas.edu/) at the University of Texas at Austin for providing high-performance computing resources that have contributed to the research results reported within this paper. The authors acknowledge the 1000 Genomes Project Consortium for generating and providing the DNA sequence resources used in this study. The authors thank S. Barton for copyediting the manuscript. The authors thank S. Xu, Y. Guan, T.J. Maxwell, F. Yu and E. Boerwinkle for helpful discussions and encouragement. This study was supported by US National Institutes of Health grants 1U01HG005728 and 2U54HG003273 and by Chinese NSF grant 91231120.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

X.L. designed the study, developed the method, conducted the analyses and wrote the manuscript. Y.-X.F. provided critical advice on methodology development and result interpretation.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xiaoming Liu.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Integrated supplementary information

Supplementary Figure 1 Comparing the inferred histories of the stairway plot and the PSMC method using simulated samples based on five models.

(a) PSMC “sim-1” model. (b) PSMC “sim-2” model. (c) PSMC “sim-3” model. (d) PSMC “sim-YH” model. (e) Population 1 of the population split model. (f) Population 2 of the population split model. We assumed a mutation rate of 1.2 × 10–8 mutations per base pair per generation and a generation time of 24 years. Thin black lines, true models. Thick orange lines, medians of the inferred histories of the stairway plot; thin orange lines, 2.5 and 97.5 percentiles of the inferred histories of the stairway plot. Thick green lines, medians of the inferred histories of the PSMC method; thin green lines, 2.5 and 97.5 percentiles of the inferred histories of the PSMC method. n is number of simulated sequences, and L is the length of the simulated sequences. Dotted lines in e and f indicate the time point at which population 1 and population 2 split.

Supplementary Figure 2 Effects of sequence length, sample size and recombination rate on the inferences of the stairway plot.

We assumed a mutation rate of 1.2 × 10–8 mutations per base pair per generation and a generation time of 24 years. Sequences were simulated on the basis of the complex model I (see the Supplementary Note for details) assuming different sequence lengths (top row, ac), sample sizes (middle row, a,d,e) or recombination rates (bottom row, a,f,g). Thin black lines, true models. Thick orange lines, medians of the inferred histories of the stairway plot; thin orange lines, 2.5 and 97.5 percentiles of the inferred histories of the stairway plot. N is the number of simulated sequences, L is the length of the simulated sequences, r is the recombination rate per site and t is the mutation rate per site.

Supplementary Figure 3 Simulation experiments on the unobserved bottlenecks of the 1000 Genomes Project populations.

(a) YRI model. (b) CEU-LWK hybrid model. (c) FIN-LWK hybrid model. (d) FIN-CEU-LWK hybrid model. Thin black lines, true models. Thick orange lines, medians of the inferred histories of the stairway plot; thin orange lines, 2.5 and 97.5 percentiles of the inferred histories of the stairway plot.

Supplementary Figure 4 Stairway plot estimations (medians) of the nine 1000 Genomes Project populations.

The bottlenecks after 200,000 years ago are likely artificial bottlenecks.

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Supplementary Figures 1–4 and Supplementary Note. (PDF 1448 kb)

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Liu, X., Fu, YX. Exploring population size changes using SNP frequency spectra. Nat Genet 47, 555–559 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3254

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