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Journal of Heredity Advance Access published online on October 20, 2008
Journal of Heredity, doi:10.1093/jhered/esn088
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© The American Genetic Association. 2008. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

Simultaneous Estimation of Null Alleles and Inbreeding Coefficients

Igor J. Chybicki, and Jaroslaw Burczyk

From the Department of Genetics, Institute of Experimental Biology, Kazimierz Wielki University, Bydgoszcz 85-064, Poland

Address correspondence to I. J. Chybicki at the address above, or e-mail: igorchy{at}ukw.edu.pl.

Although microsatellites are a very efficient tool for many population genetics applications, they may occasionally produce "null" alleles, which, when present in high proportion, may affect estimates of key parameters such as inbreeding and relatedness coefficients or measures of genetic differentiation. In order to account for the presence of null alleles, it is first necessary to estimate their frequency within studied populations. However, the commonly used null allele frequency estimators are not of general applicability because they can produce upwardly biased estimates when a population under study experiences some inbreeding. In such a case, 2 formerly described approaches, population inbreeding model and individual inbreeding model, can be applied for simultaneous estimation of null allele frequencies and of the inbreeding coefficient. In this study, we demonstrate the properties and utility of these 2 methods and show that they outperform the commonly used approaches in the estimation of null allele frequencies based on genotypic data. The methods are applied to empirical data from a natural population of European beech (Fagus sylvatica L.), and results are briefly discussed. The methods presented in this paper are implemented in the Windows-based user-friendly INEST computer program (available free of charge at http://genetyka.ukw.edu.pl/INEst10_setup.exe).

Key Words: estimation • Fagus sylvatica • inbreeding • microsatellite • null allele • SSR

Corresponding Editor: Halina Knap

Received October 3, 2007
Revised July 25, 2008
Accepted September 10, 2008


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