Workshop: Simulation and inference in population genetics

Description

In this interactive workshop, we aim at introducing some state-of-art population genetics tools that are most useful for the general ASHG community and provide hands-on experiences for attendees to learn and understand these tools. The audience will learn population genetic simulations, global and local ancestry inference, genealogy and tree inference, advanced demographic history inference from experts on these topics. Each topic takes 20 minutes, with 10 minutes discussion in the end.

In the first half of this workshop, we will instruct how to perform forward simulations with SLiM and backward simulation with msPrime for simulating a large number of genomes (and phenotypes) under mutation, recombination, selection, and population structure. Data from realistic simulations are useful for understanding genomic patterns, benchmarking new methods, and testing hypotheses.

We will then introduce global ancestry (i.e., the proportion of a genome that comes from each population) and local ancestry (i.e., genomic segments come from each population) inference methods. Ancestry information is useful for understanding population history, identifying selection, and mapping disease loci. In the second part of this workshop, we will instruct recently developed methods for constructing whole-genome genealogies. These new methods opened up possibilities to utilize the genomic information efficiently and opportunities to understand selection and demography more accurately. We will then instruct various methods for inferring complex demographic history and best practices for a given dataset

We will collect questions the audience is interested in tackling during the workshop, and our instructors will host a short discussion at the end to discuss how these tools could be used to address their specific questions.