Improved haplotype-based detection of ongoing selective sweeps towards an application in Arabidopsis thaliana

BACKGROUND: The increasing amount of genome information allows us to address various questions regarding the molecular evolution and population genetics of different species. Such genome-wide data sets including thousands of individuals genotyped at hundreds of thousands of markers require time-efficient and powerful analysis methods. Demography and sampling introduce a bias into present population genetic tests of natural selection, which may confound results. Thus, a modification of test statistics is necessary to introduce time-efficient and unbiased analysis methods. RESULTS: We present an improved haplotype-based test of selective sweeps in samples of unequally related individuals. For this purpose, we modified existing tests by weighting the contribution of each individual based on its uniqueness in the entire sample. In contrast to previous tests, this modified test is feasible even for large genome-wide data sets of multiple individuals. We utilize coalescent simulations to estimate the sensitivity of such haplotype-based test statistics to complex demographic scenarios, such as population structure, population growth and bottlenecks. The analysis of empirical data from humans reveals different results compared to previous tests. Additionally, we show that our statistic is applicable to empirical data from Arabidopsis thaliana. Overall, the modified test leads to a slight but significant increase of power to detect selective sweeps among all demographic scenarios. CONCLUSIONS: The concept of this modification might be applied to other statistics in population genetics to reduce the intrinsic bias of demography and sampling. Additionally, the combination of different test statistics may further improve the performance of tests for natural selection.