A unified approach to study hypervariable polymorphisms: Statistical considerations of determining relatedness and population distances

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Abstract
Relatedness between individuals as well as evolutionary relationships between populations can be studied by comparing genotypic similarities between individuals. When hypervariable loci are used to describe genotypes, it is shown that both of these problems can be approached with a unified theory based on allele sharing between individuals. The distributions of the number of shared alleles between individuals indicate their kin relationships. Extending this, we obtain statistics for genetic distances between populations based on average number of alleles shared between individuals within and between two different populations.