The scale of population structure in Arabidopsis thaliana. Plos Genetics 6. permutations of the original data resulted in a genome wide 95% LOD threshold of ,2.6 for both quantified trait. Markers, used as cofactors, were chosen by backward selection. For

Abstract

The population structure of an organism reflects its evolutionary history and influences its evolutionary trajectory. It constrains the combination of genetic diversity and reveals patterns of past gene flow. Understanding it is a prerequisite for detecting genomic regions under selection, predicting the effect of population disturbances, or modeling gene flow. This paper examines the detailed global population structure of Arabidopsis thaliana. Using a set of 5,707 plants collected from around the globe and genotyped at 149 SNPs, we show that while A. thaliana as a species self-fertilizes 97 % of the time, there is considerable variation among local groups. This level of outcrossing greatly limits observed heterozygosity but i