Archive
PhD defence, 20 June 2016
Published 2016-06-20
This is a historical snapshot of the PhD defence held on Monday 20 June 2016 at INSA Toulouse. Venue directions from 2016 are omitted because they are no longer useful as travel instructions.
Thesis title: Reconstructing the demographic history of populations from genomic data.
Programme (historical)
| Time | Event |
|---|---|
| 08:30–09:00 | Welcome coffee |
| 09:00–09:45 | Rasmus Heller — Should we do genotyping by sequencing? |
| 09:50–10:35 | Olivier François — Fast inference of individual ancestry coefficients using geographic data |
| 10:40–11:00 | Coffee break |
| 11:00–11:45 | Mark Beaumont — Expectation Propagation for demographic inference using genome data |
| 11:50–13:30 | Lunch |
| 14:00 | PhD defence — Willy Rodríguez |
A HAL record of the thesis is available at https://theses.hal.science/tel-01846075.
Thesis abstract (as circulated in 2016)
The rapid development of DNA sequencing technologies is expanding the horizons of population genetic studies. It is expected that genomic data will increase our ability to reconstruct the history of populations. While this increase in genetic information will likely help biologists and anthropologists to reconstruct the demographic history of populations, it also poses challenges. In some cases, simplicity of the model may lead to erroneous conclusions about the population under study. Recent work has shown that DNA patterns expected in individuals coming from structured populations correspond with those of unstructured populations with changes in size through time. As a consequence it is often difficult to determine whether demographic events such as expansions or contractions inferred from genetic data are real or due to the fact that populations are structured in nature.
In this thesis, some results in population genetics are presented: (i) a model-choice procedure is proposed to distinguish one simple scenario of population-size change from one of structured population, based on the coalescence times of two genes; (ii) by using the notion of instantaneous coalescent rate, it is shown that for any structured scenario there exists a panmictic scenario with a precise function of population-size changes having exactly the same distribution for the coalescence times of two genes; (iii) a method based on a Markov process is developed for inferring past demographic events while taking structure into account.
Related publications are collected on the publications page and in the IICR project.