CiteULike is a free online bibliography manager. Register and you can start organising your references online.

Generalized analysis of molecular variance. Export

PLoS Genet, Vol. 3, No. 4. (6 April 2007)

Citation Format

[Posts]

View FullText article


ryanraaum's tags for this article

amova arlequin bio-tools genetic-diversity methods statistics

X Reviews [Write a review of this article]

X Find related articles from these CiteULike users

X Find related articles with these CiteULike tags

X Posting History

X Abstract

Many studies in the fields of genetic epidemiology and applied population genetics are predicated on, or require, an assessment of the genetic background diversity of the individuals chosen for study. A number of strategies have been developed for assessing genetic background diversity. These strategies typically focus on genotype data collected on the individuals in the study, based on a panel of DNA markers. However, many of these strategies are either rooted in cluster analysis techniques, and hence suffer from problems inherent to the assignment of the biological and statistical meaning to resulting clusters, or have formulations that do not permit easy and intuitive extensions. We describe a very general approach to the problem of assessing genetic background diversity that extends the analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) strategy introduced by Excoffier and colleagues some time ago. As in the original AMOVA strategy, the proposed approach, termed generalized AMOVA (GAMOVA), requires a genetic similarity matrix constructed from the allelic profiles of individuals under study and/or allele frequency summaries of the populations from which the individuals have been sampled. The proposed strategy can be used to either estimate the fraction of genetic variation explained by grouping factors such as country of origin, race, or ethnicity, or to quantify the strength of the relationship of the observed genetic background variation to quantitative measures collected on the subjects, such as blood pressure levels or anthropometric measures. Since the formulation of our test statistic is rooted in multivariate linear models, sets of variables can be related to genetic background in multiple regression-like contexts. GAMOVA can also be used to complement graphical representations of genetic diversity such as tree diagrams (dendrograms) or heatmaps. We examine features, advantages, and power of the proposed procedure and showcase its flexibility by using it to analyze a wide variety of published data sets, including data from the Human Genome Diversity Project, classical anthropometry data collected by Howells, and the International HapMap Project.


X BibTeX record

X RIS record


Privacy Statement | Terms & Conditions
CiteULike organises scholarly (or academic) papers or literature and provides bibliographic (which means it makes bibliographies) for universities and higher education establishments. It helps undergraduates and postgraduates. People studying for PhDs or in postdoctoral (postdoc) positions. The service is similar in scope to EndNote or RefWorks or any other reference manager like BibTeX, but it is a social bookmarking service for scientists and humanities researchers.