Biological Modelling Stanford University One of the most variable classes of DNA in humans consists of repeated motifs of DNA pairs, triplets, or quadruplets. Mathematical models for the evolution of such loci in finite populations subject to mutation are analyzed.
Genealogical methods provide a powerful way to analyze samples of alleles at non-recombining loci.
The non-recombining part of the Y chromosome has yielded a number of polymorphisms, both short tandem repeats and single nucelotide polymorphisms. We have made a statistical analysis of these and find that the mean of the time since the most recent common ancestor of human Y chromosomes is much shorter than previously thought.