Allele Matrices - need correction
Up to Week 8: Distance-based methodsAllele Matrices - need correction
Posted by Melanie Murphy at March 06. 2009Hi Sam -
I like how you are demonstrating genetic distance by having
students take a look at the matrices. However, the matrix you use as
an example is inaccurate for representing microsatellite data. There
will be two alleles/locus for a diploid species. No matter how alleles
are distributed amoung loci, this is not possible with the current
example. In addition, due to this dependency A = B in the case of the Bray-Curtis (# of loci * 2, or more generally # loci * ploidy).
I put an example below, keeping the number of alleles (6) the same as
your example. Each letter represents a locus (X locus, 3 alleles; Y locus, 2 alleles; Z locus, 1 allele). I suggest updating your
matrices and indicating loci in some way (color, heavy outlines,
Loc1_A/Loc1_B, etc). AFLP data could also be represented, but would be presence/absence of alleles (0,1).
X.1 X.2 X.3 Y.4 Y.5 Z.6 A B C
Bear1 1 1 0 2 0 2 6
Bear 2 0 1 1 1 1 2 6
Min 0 1 0 1 0 2 4