- THIS ARTICLE
-
Abstract
- Full Text (PDF)
- Alert me when this article is cited
- Alert me if a correction is posted
- SERVICES
- Similar articles in this journal
- Similar articles in PubMed
- Alert me to new issues of the journal
- Download to citation manager
- Reprints & Permissions
- CITING ARTICLES
- Citing Articles via HighWire
- Citing Articles via Google Scholar
- GOOGLE SCHOLAR
- Articles by Estoup, A.
- Articles by Moritz, C.
- Search for Related Content
- PUBMED
- PubMed Citation
- Articles by Estoup, A.
- Articles by Moritz, C.
Inferring Population History From Microsatellite and Enzyme Data in Serially Introduced Cane Toads, Bufo marinus
Arnaud Estoupa,b, Ian J. Wilsonc, Claire Sullivana, Jean-Marie Cornuetb, and Craig Moritza,da Department of Zoology and Entomology, University of Queensland, QLD 4072 Australia,
b Centre de Biologie et de Gestion des Populations, Campus International de Baillarguet, 34980 Montferrier/Lez, France,
c Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen AB24 3UE, United Kingdom
d Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720-3160
Corresponding author: Arnaud Estoup, Centre de Biologie et de Gestion des Populations, Campus International de Baillarguet, CS 30 016, 34980 Montferrier/Lez, France., estoup{at}ensam.inra.fr (E-mail)
| ABSTRACT |
|---|
Much progress has been made on inferring population history from molecular data. However, complex demographic scenarios have been considered rarely or have proved intractable. The serial introduction of the South-Central American cane toad Bufo marinus in various Caribbean and Pacific islands involves four major phases: a possible genetic admixture during the first introduction, a bottleneck associated with founding, a transitory population boom, and finally, a demographic stabilization. A large amount of historical and demographic information is available for those introductions and can be combined profitably with molecular data. We used a Bayesian approach to combine this information with microsatellite (10 loci) and enzyme (22 loci) data and used a rejection algorithm to simultaneously estimate the demographic parameters describing the four major phases of the introduction history. The general historical trends supported by microsatellites and enzymes were similar. However, there was a stronger support for a larger bottleneck at introductions for microsatellites than enzymes and for a more balanced genetic admixture for enzymes than for microsatellites. Very little information was obtained from either marker about the transitory population boom observed after each introduction. Possible explanations for differences in resolution of demographic events and discrepancies between results obtained with microsatellites and enzymes were explored. Limits of our model and method for the analysis of nonequilibrium populations were discussed.
THE evolutionary history of natural or introduced populations typically involves complex changes in (effective) size and occasionally genetic admixture between more or less differentiated forms. This represents a major challenge to population genetic theory, most of which is based on equilibrium or simple nonequilibrium models. Much emphasis has been put on inferring historical processes from molecular data (reviewed in ![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
In recent years, important advances have been made toward the goal of estimating the probability of obtaining a given gene sample configuration to make "fully likelihood-based" statistical inference from molecular data, rather than drawing inferences based on summary statistics (![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
In this context, the biological and demographic model studied here presents four major points of interest: (i) The serial introduction of cane toad (Bufo marinus) in the Caribbean and Pacific islands exemplifies a complex historical process involving genetic admixture and a series of population size fluctuations; (ii) it is a recent process, which contrasts with the larger timescale of the demographic events previously studied, for instance, in human populations (e.g., ![]()
![]()
| MATERIALS AND METHODS |
|---|
Demographic model:
The cane toad is native to the American tropics and was deliberately introduced as a biocontrol agent between the middle of the 19th and 20th centuries in numerous islands of the Caribbean and the Pacific. A large amount of historical and demographic information about those introductions is available (reviewed in ![]()
|
The early introductions were made from both French Guyana and British Guyana to Barbados in 1833, from Barbados to Jamaica in 1844, from Jamaica to the northeast of Puerto Rico in 1923, from the northeast of Puerto Rico to the island of Oahu (Hawaiian archipelagos) in 1932, and from Oahu to Gordonvale in Australia (northeast Queensland) in 1935. Forty individuals were introduced in northeast Puerto Rico, 148 in Oahu, and 101 in Gordonvale. The number of introduced individuals is unknown for Barbados and Jamaica. B. marinus is a highly prolific species (750020,000 eggs/female; ![]()
![]()
Information on the origin and dates of introductions allowed us to fix the times for the admixture and population size fluctuation events in the coalescent gene tree and hence to limit the number of parameters in our model (Fig 1). The population size fluctuations were specified by four variable parameters: the number of introduced individuals (N3), the effective population size after the demographic boom (N2) and its duration (DB), and the effective population size after stabilization (N1). The sudden character of the population explosion documented in all islands made it sensible to assume that the introduced population goes from N3 to N1 in a single generation and from N1 to N2 in a single generation too. Population reduction to N1 also appears to be rapid (![]()
We used genetic data obtained from populations introduced to Australia and the Hawaiian islands. In both cases the toads were reared and released initially in one area and the offspring were then distributed to five discrete areas: in Hawaii, the islands of Kauai, Molokai, Maui, Hawaii, and Oahu (from 1933 to 1935) and, in Australia, Bundaberg, MacKay, Ayr, Ingham, and Gordonvale districts (from 1936 to 1937). The number of individuals involved in these distributions was large, of the order of tens of thousands (reviewed in ![]()
Population sampling and marker analysis:
The B. marinus populations sampled for this study correspond to the five main introduction points in Australia (Bundaberg, Mackay, Gordonvale, Ayr, and Ingham), the five main introduction points in the Hawaiian islands (Kauai, Molokai, Maui, Hawaii, and Aiea), and the two source populations (Kourou in French Guyana and Georgetown in British Guyana). The exact locations of the 10 introduced populations are given in ![]()
In making inferences about population history it is desirable to use data from many unlinked loci (e.g., ![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
The data set of 22 enzyme loci genotyped across the 10 points of introduction was produced by ![]()
![]()
![]()
Estimation procedure for demographic and marker parameters:
Because of the large amount of background information in the present setting, the Bayesian paradigm provides an appropriate framework for statistical inference. In the Bayesian language, the demographic models specify prior distributions for the genealogical tree, and inference then proceeds via the posterior distribution of the tree given the observed data, the coalescent prior for the genealogy, and the priors for the demographic and marker parameters. Posterior distributions tend to give most support to the neighborhood of the true value, although the prior can have an important influence on the posterior. This method allows the data to speak simultaneously for all parameters of interest and to estimate both marginal and joint distributions of those parameters.
The coalescent model (![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
Because of the complexity of our demographic history, we used a nonfully likelihood method based on a rejection algorithm modified from ![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
Posterior distributions for the parameters of interest were estimated using the following rejection algorithm:
- Simulate independently values from the distributions of priors (see below) for the six demographic parameters N1, N2, N3, DB, AR, and TS.
- Simulate, using the coalescent process and the above demographic parameter values, a genealogical tree representing the relationships between the m chromosomes for each of the unlinked loci (10 for microsatellites and 22 for enzymes).
- Simulate values from the prior distributions (see below) for one or two marker parameters, namely, the mutation rate (µ) and, for microsatellites only, the variance of the geometric distribution for changes in repeat number (
2); then simulate genotypes for each of the m/2 individuals at each locus, using those marker parameter values and the genealogical tree. - Compute a*, H*, Fst*, and V* (for microsatellites) from the simulated genotypes.
- If all of |a - a*|/a, |H - H*|/H, |Fst - Fst*|/Fst, and |V - V*|/V (for microsatellites) are less than a small number (
), then record N1, N2, N3, DB, AR, TS, µ, and
2 (for microsatellites) for the posterior distributions. - Return to 1.
This procedure gives a sample from the posterior distributions of N1, N2, N3, DB, AR, TS, µ, and
2 (for microsatellites), conditional on a, H, Fst, and V (for microsatellites) being within
of the observed values. ![]()
values of
0.1 for similar statistics. In this study, simulation showed a relatively low sensitivity of results to
values between 0.1 and 0.2 for microsatellites and between 0.05 and 0.1 for enzymes. However, those tests showed that the acceptance rate decreased rapidly with lower
values (e.g., for microsatellites, 1/3000 and 1/15,500 for
= 0.14 and 0.1, respectively). Therefore, most treatments were done using intermediate
values of 0.08 for enzymes (acceptance rate, 1/1800) and 0.14 for microsatellites.
Prior distributions of demographic parameters:
Information available from literature on the cane toad introductions was used to inform prior beliefs about demographic parameters (Table 1). Cane toads reach sexual maturity at
1 year and are then immediately reproductively active (![]()
1 year seems sensible (see also ![]()
![]()
|
![]()
![]()
100 and 800 individuals. This interval was relatively narrow but only considered errors in estimating Fst from genetic samples, but not uncertainty in estimating the effective population size from Fst. Ecological, historical, and demographic data gave neighborhood size estimations of Australian populations between 470 and 46,200 individuals (![]()
![]()
N3 (N3 being the number of founding individuals), which gives support to values from a few to >20,000 individuals.
Less information is available on the effective population size during the boom period (N2). In several islands, extremely large densities with "hundreds of thousands of individuals" have been mentioned, without much detail on the geographical scale (reviewed in ![]()
![]()
N1, which gives support to values of a few tens to several millions of individuals. The boom at population size N2 is transitory. Its duration (DB) appears to be
530 years (e.g., between 1923 and 1935 in Puerto Rico; ![]()
![]()
The number of individuals introduced in each island varies between 40 (Puerto Rico) and 148 (Hawaii Island) with a mean of 96. We assume the number introduced to Jamaica and Barbados to be in this range. The mean number of effective individuals (N3) is thus bounded between 2 and
150. N3 is also likely to be considerably low because of the possibility of an unequal sex ratio, the introduction of immature individuals, and the large reproductive variance between adults. This was taken into account by choosing a LN(3, 1) as prior distribution for N3 with lower and upper bounds of 2 and 150, respectively. The range of supported values for N3 was between 3 and 110 (Table 1). We also recorded the founding ratio
, the prior on FR being obtained by combining the prior on N1 and N3.
No information was available regarding the level of divergence between the two source populations and the admixture rate in Barbados between those two populations. Genotyping of 10 microsatellite loci from two samples, French Guyana and British Guyana, showed that the source populations were highly differentiated, supporting the hypothesis of a hybrid origin for all introduced island populations (A. ESTOUP and C. MORITZ, unpublished data). The differentiation was measured by computing the mean genetic distance (
µ)2 (![]()
µ)2 = 19.140. Assuming a strict stepwise mutation model (SMM; ![]()
![]()
µ)2 equates to a mean time since separation of the source populations of 19,140 generations (![]()
700 and 73,500 generations (Table 1). In the absence of prior information, we adopted a flat prior for the admixture rate in Barbados (AR) corresponding to a uniform distribution with lower and upper bounds equal to 0 (no admixture, all individuals originate from a single source population) and 0.5 (50% of individuals originate from each source population), respectively.
Prior distributions of marker parameters:
Interlocus variability in the mutation rate and model (reviewed in ![]()
![]()
Microsatellites:
We modeled the mutation rate at microsatellite loci, allowing for variation of mutation rate across loci, while maintaining an appropriate amount of uncertainty in the mean mutation rate. On the basis of data from humans (![]()
6.2 x 10-4. Hence, in each replicate, we first simulated a mean mutation rate from our gamma(768, 1,238,710) prior, and then, for each locus, the mutation rate was drawn from an exponential distribution with that mean. The mutation rate variance across loci combining these priors is substantial with 2.5 and 97.5% quantiles equal to 1.6 x 10-5 and 2.3 x 10-3, respectively. Those values are similar to interval values typically considered for autosomal microsatellites in human (10-310-5; ![]()
![]()
![]()
On the basis of recent observations (reviewed in ![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
2 = 
+
i=1[i2(1 - p)i] -
=
. The large data set of microsatellite mutations for humans of ![]()
2 near 0.36. Hence, we modeled the variance in mutation size,
2, as having an exponential distribution with mean 0.36 as prior.
Enzymes:
Information available on the mean and the interlocus variance of the mutation rate is even poorer for enzyme than for microsatellite loci. Studies of the accumulation of allozyme mutants in Drosophila melanogaster lines gave spontaneous mutation rates between 5.14 x 10-6 (![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
Under the standard coalescent, no information about the values of population sizes (N) and µ can be obtained from allelic data except through their product,
= 2Nµ. Some information can be inferred for N separately if information about µ and the mutation model can be obtained from other sources, as done in this study. However, if the information on µ and the mutation model is biased or incorrect, it is expected to change our inferences about N as well as those on other demographic parameters such as the admixture rate and time since separation of source populations. To address this issue, simulations were done in which the mutation rates were drawn from a gamma(2, µ/2) prior distribution with µ = 10-3 or 10-4 for microsatellites and µ = 10-5 or 10-6 for enzymes. Those priors allowed exploration of mutation rate conditions that were substantially different from those used previously while keeping a reasonable variance for µ (e.g., 2.5 and 97.5% quantiles equal 1.2 x 10-5 and 2.8 x 10-4, respectively, for µ = 10-4). In additional test simulations focusing on mutation models, we assumed a SMM for both categories of markers and, for microsatellites only, the occurrence of constraints on allele size or of a mutation bias resulting in the gain of a repeat unit that was more frequent than the loss of a repeat unit (reviewed in ![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
Tests for a constant demography:
The null hypothesis of constant demography was tested in two different ways. First, a population that has recently experienced a population reduction or a genetic admixture between two differentiated forms will generally develop a heterozygosity excess, while populations that have experienced a population expansion will show a heterozygosity deficit (![]()
2) fixed to 0.36. Computations were done using the package Bottleneck (![]()
![]()
In a second set of computations, we aimed to test whether the enzyme and microsatellite data for the introduced cane toad populations supported our complex model summarized in Fig 1 rather than a model of constant demography. This was done by opposing in a Bayesian framework the two demographic models, the constant demography model being specified by only two (or three) parameters (i.e., N1, µ, and
2 for microsatellites) and the complex model by seven (or eight) parameters (i.e., N1, N2, N3, DB, AR, TS, µ, and
2 for microsatellites). As the probabilities of the two models could not be calculated directly, we used acceptance rates for our simulations, which act as an estimate of the posterior probability (![]()
(0.08 and 0.14 for enzymes and microsatellites, respectively), we estimated the acceptance rates for each model over 2 x 106 and 1 x 106 iterations for microsatellites and enzymes, respectively, and hence an estimate of the relative posterior probabilities of models pm1 and pm2. Finally, we applied a correction to take into account the different number of parameters in both models. Because our models are nested, we considered that the statistic G = 2 ln(pm2/pm1) followed a
2 distribution with the number of degrees of freedom equal to the number of parameters present in one model and absent in the other. This is analogous to a likelihood-ratio test for nested models (![]()
| RESULTS |
|---|
Summary statistics and tests of the constant demography model:
The summary statistics used for the rejection algorithm (number of alleles, gene diversity, allele size variance, and Fst) are given for the Australian and Hawaiian populations and for the microsatellite and enzyme markers in Table 2.
|
As expected, microsatellites (9 polymorphic and 1 monomorphic loci) showed a higher level of variability than enzymes (10 polymorphic and 12 monomorphic loci). The slightly higher Fst values for microsatellites than for enzymes could reflect the more recent sampling time for microsatellites. Note that considering polymorphic loci only instead of all loci change substantially the values of the statistics other than Fst (Table 2), illustrating the bias that could occur if only polymorphic markers were selected. In the following analyses (except for the test of ![]()
For both source populations, no significant deviations from mutation-drift equilibrium were detected using heterozygosity or allele size variance as test statistics (Table 3).
|
On the other hand, for the introduced populations, all 10 populations for enzymes and 3 of 5 for microsatellites showed a significant excess of heterozygosity, and all 5 populations showed a significant excess of microsatellite allele size variance (Table 3). These deviations from equilibrium are in agreement with at least two demographic events: a bottleneck associated with founding and the mixing of individuals from two differentiated source populations in Barbados. No signal of recent population expansions (deficit of heterozygosity and/or allele size variance) that could have reflected the boom-and-bust phenomenon following each introduction could be detected in any introduced population.
Our Bayesian hypothesis test shows that all posterior support was on our complex introduction scenario (pm2 > 0.998 and 0.996 for microsatellites and enzymes, respectively), when opposed to the model of constant demography. The constant demography model was still rejected in favor of our complex introduction scenario when applying a correction taking into account the different number of parameters in both models (G > 12.84, d.f. = 5, p < 0.025). Moreover, opposing our complex demographic model to the same model without admixture shows that the posterior support was much stronger for the complex introduction scenario with admixture for both microsatellites (G = 6.87, d.f. = 2, p = 0.032) and enzymes (G > 12.44, d.f. = 2, p < 0.002).
Inferences from posterior distributions:
The density curves as well as the mean and the 5 and 95% quantiles are given in Fig 2 and Fig 3 for the prior and the posterior distributions of each of the demographic and marker parameters.
|
|
In describing our results, we regard the posterior median (50% quantile) of each parameter as a point estimate (e.g., ![]()
For both microsatellites and enzymes the posteriors for the stable effective population size (N1) were sharper than the priors, with diminished support for high and low prior values resulting in a much narrower 95% interval (Fig 2). The posterior distribution was slightly narrower and with a lower median for microsatellite than for allozyme loci. Highest support was for N1 values of a few hundred effective individuals (point estimates
320420). These estimates are similar to the effective population size estimated by ![]()
) were larger than the prior one. Nevertheless, 95% quantiles for FR were much lower for the posteriors than the prior, indicating that the bottleneck is of moderate intensity, especially for enzymes. The graph in Fig 2 also shows a different relationship between N1 and N3 for microsatellites and enzymes: The correlation between N1 and N3 appears to be negative for microsatellites and positive for enzymes, and the range of N3 values associated with a given range of N1 values is larger for enzymes than for microsatellites. Posterior distributions for admixture rate and time since isolation were shifted toward higher values, giving support to the occurrence of genetic admixture in Barbados between two substantially differentiated source populations (Fig 3). The shift of posterior distributions was considerably stronger for enzymes than microsatellites.
The posterior distributions for N2 and the boom duration were similar to the corresponding prior distributions. Moreover, posterior distributions for each of those parameters changed substantially when using different priors, with posterior shapes tracking those of the priors (results not shown). Thus, the genetic data contained very little information on the parameters dealing with the boom-and-bust events.
Regarding marker parameters, posteriors for the mutation rate µ (as well as for the mean mutation rates
) were shifted toward larger values for enzymes (point estimates around µ = 4.5 x 10-6 vs. 3.3 x 10-6 for the prior). In contrast a shift toward smaller µ values was observed for microsatellites (point estimates
3.1 x 10-4 vs. 4.3 x 10-4 for the prior), although this shift was not apparent for
(Fig 3). The combination of summary statistics is expected to contain some information about the variance of the geometric distribution of the GSM assumed for microsatellites (
2). However, our data did not allow any inference on this parameter, the prior and posterior distributions being very similar (Fig 3).
Sensitivity to marker and demographic priors:
The results of simulations testing the effect of the mutation rates and models of markers on historical inferences are summarized in Table 4 for four demographic parameters for which significant information could be previously obtained.
|
A first major conclusion is that the demographic trends previously observed still hold for all additional simulations, indicating that our inferences are relatively robust to prior beliefs on the mutation parameters. However, both stronger allele size constraints and especially lower mutation rates tended to shift posterior support toward a less intense bottleneck and a more balanced admixture. The posterior shifts observed with different mutation rates are larger for microsatellites than enzymes. The effect of allele size constraints at microsatellites is more pronounced on parameters dealing with the admixture event (AR and TS) than on those dealing with the founder events, while the effect is substantial on both events for the mutation rate. The assumption of a SMM rather than an IAM for enzymes and a GSM for microsatellites had very little effect on posterior distributions. The only exception concerns the separation time (TS) between the two source populations, which was larger for microsatellites under a SMM than a GSM. Including a positive mutation bias in the microsatellite mutation model did not affect any posterior distributions.
The robustness of the main conclusions of this study to the prior distribution of the demographic parameters was evaluated using entirely flat priors (i.e., uniform distributions) for all demographic parameters: a U[2150] for N3, a U[22000] with N1
N3 for N1, a U[250,000] with N2
N1 for N2, a U[050] for DB, a U[Ti60,000] with Ti the number of generations since introduction in Barbados for TS, and a U[00.5] for AR. As expected, posterior distributions were affected by prior changes (curves not shown but see Table 4). However, the posterior shifts supported again the occurrence of genetic admixture in Barbados and of bottlenecks of moderate intensity in each island. Those additional simulations also confirmed the stronger support for a larger bottleneck at introductions for microsatellites than for enzymes and a more balanced genetic admixture for enzymes than for microsatellites. Note that acceptance rates for microsatellites were two to three times smaller with the initial priors, making an already lengthy treatment even more time consuming.
| DISCUSSION |
|---|
Resolution of different demographic events:
The absence of support for transitory population explosions does not necessarily imply that the large increase of density observed in new cane toad populations does not translate into a large increase in the effective number of individuals. Change of the prior distribution results in similar change in the posterior distribution of N2, such that the posterior tracks the prior, indicating that the data contain very little information on this demographic parameter. Poor resolution is expected for large values of effective population size during a population flush of short duration (DB << N1 and N2), since different (large) N2 values generate a similar effect in terms of drift or number of coalescent events per generation (i.e., reduced drift and rate of coalescence). The pattern of new allelic variants arising through mutation should contain information about the population size; however, observing this pattern requires a sufficiently large number of generations to allow new variants to be generated. It is likely that the ages of the introduction events (
167 generations) and the duration of each population explosion are insufficiently large even for highly mutable markers such as microsatellites. Moreover, the occurrence of founder events after each expansion period makes it difficult to maintain low frequency new variants or, rather, allows the quick emergence of those new variants at high frequency.
This limit should not hold for founder (or bottleneck) events since the detection and quantification of such demographic events does not require the occurrence of new mutations. The effect of bottleneck(s) is essentially a rapid erosion of the existing allelic diversity through the loss of alleles, a feature that should be quickly detectable for any category of markers. In agreement with this, both microsatellite and enzyme data support the occurrence of effective population size reduction(s). In a similar way, the detection of admixture between differentiated taxa relies on differentiation between source populations accumulated as mutations during their independent evolution, rather than the retention of new allelic variants, so that its detection and quantification should be possible early in the history of populations, a prediction also confirmed by our results.
Discrepancies between microsatellite and enzyme markers:
The discrepancies observed for posterior distributions for microsatellite and enzyme markers were particularly large for the demographic parameters related to founding and admixture events. This may reflect the occurrence of particular evolutionary features at one or both categories of markers not taken, or wrongly taken, into account by our model.
For microsatellites, test simulations showed that our perception of the intensity of the founder and admixture events may be biased, using a prior on mutation rate that tended to overestimate mutation rates and/or by the occurrence of allele size constraints. Strong allele size constraints and especially lower mutation rates both tend to shift posterior support toward a less intense bottleneck and a more balanced admixture. This is because lower mutation rates and (strong) allele size constraints both reduce the number of alleles as well as the allele size variance so that less intense bottleneck and more intense admixture are required to explain an excess of heterozygosity and of allele size variance relative to the number of alleles in the gene samples. The cooccurrence of lower mutation rate and strong allele size constraints could hence explain, at least partly, the discrepancy between some posterior distributions for microsatellites and enzymes. The mutation model itself (i.e., SMM vs. GSM) does not explain those discrepancies except, to a certain extent, for the time since separation of the two source populations.
Our simulations also showed that strong founder events may be undersupported and admixture oversupported by the use of a prior on enzyme mutation rate that underestimates mutation rates. Designing mutation rate priors for cane toad enzymes from Drosophila data is far from optimal due to potential variation between species. An additional issue may be that, to estimate mutation rates, amidon gels were used to reveal new variants in Drosophila (![]()
![]()
![]()
An alternative but not exclusive explanation for the discrepancies observed between microsatellites and enzymes could be the occurrence of different selective pressure on both categories of markers. If selection in favor of "hybrid" individuals (hybrid vigor, e.g., ![]()
Limits of our model and the rejection method:
Fully realistic models for the introduction and demographic history of cane toad remain inevitably outside our grasp. We had to assume an equal stable effective population size and number of founding individuals in all islands to make our model tractable with the present data set. The number of demographic parameters in our model is already large and considering different number of founders for each island would introduce compensatory effects between N1 and/or N3 values. A second potential drawback of our model is that the exact location of introduction is unknown in several cases. Since the colonization process of cane toad is likely to involve founder events (![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
We tried to take into account some of the complexity (and uncertainty) of the marker mutation processes, especially the variance of mutation rate between loci and the occurrence of multistep mutations for microsatellites. The true mutation processes for microsatellites are probably more complex than the model used here (reviewed in ![]()
![]()
![]()
The large number of summary statistics used in our rejection algorithm (four for microsatellites and three for enzymes) was necessary to tackle the complexity of our demographic scenario. These statistics are differentially sensitive to different aspects of the sorts of population fluctuation in our demographic model, and the balance between some of them is also potentially informative, as shown by previous studies [e.g., the heterozygosity vs. the number of alleles (![]()
![]()
The large number of sampled genes and markers for microsatellites and especially for enzymes (Table 2) limited the tractability of our treatments. Getting 1000 posterior values for each parameter took
3 days for microsatellites and 7 days for enzymes, when using a standard 350-Mhz PC platform. These limits of tractability were particularly obvious when we attempted to treat the microsatellite and enzyme data together (i.e., as a single data set of 32 loci and
8000 genes). In addition to the problem of dealing with the large dimension of this data set, the large number of conditional statistics (i.e., seven), and the discrepancies between microsatellites and enzymes, posteriors generated such a low acceptance rate that this treatment turned out to be intractable.
Conclusion:
This study is among the first to tackle a biologically realistic scenario incorporating the increased complexities that are usually ignored. Including prior information on demography and history has allowed a realistic Bayesian analysis of recent demographic events and cut the number of parameters to a manageable level. Although substantial uncertainties remain on several parts of our demographic model and discrepancies between microsatellite and enzyme markers were observed, our treatments allowed some important historical inferences to be made with reasonable confidence. In this context, continued reliance on equilibrium assumptions for blatantly nonequilibium systems (e.g., declining or expanding populations) should become less acceptable. Computational resources may provide a barrier to extending the type of analysis done in this article to more sophisticated modeling assumptions and larger sample size. One possible methodological solution that could represent a considerable improvement both in terms of precision and speed would consist of using computational techniques such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC; e.g., ![]()
![]()
| ACKNOWLEDGMENTS |
|---|
We thank D. Tikel, C. Dutech, R. Leblois, and V. Olson for assistance in toad sampling; S. Easteal for providing enzyme data and useful discussion on cane toad population genetics; Stuart Baird for stimulating discussions and help in the simulation of gamma distributions; J. Pritchard for advice on various theoretical aspects; and M. Slatkin and two anonymous referees for constructive comments on the manuscript. This work was supported by a Special Investigator Award to C.M. from the Australian Research Council and grants to A.E. from the Institut National de Recherche Agronomique and the French Ministere de l'Environnement on bioinvading systems.
Manuscript received April 3, 2001; Accepted for publication September 21, 2001.
| LITERATURE CITED |
|---|
ALFORD, R. A., M. P. COHEN, M. R. CROSSLAND, M. N. HEARNDEN, D. JAMES et al., 1995 Population biology of Bufo marinus in Northern Australia, pp. 173181 in Wetland Research in the Wet-Dry tropics of Australia, edited by M. FINLAYSON. Office of the Supervising Scientist Report 101, Canberra, Australia.
BAHLO, M. and R. C. GRIFFITH, 2000 Inference from gene trees in a subdivided population. Theor. Popul. Biol. 57:79-95[Medline].
BEAUMONT, M., 1999 Detecting population expansion and decline using microsatellites. Genetics 153:2013-2029
BEERLI, P. and J. FELSENSTEIN, 1999 Maximum-likelihood estimation of migration rates and effective population numbers in two populations using a coalescent approach. Genetics 152:763-773
COOPER, G., N. BURROUGHS, D. A. RAND, D. C. RUBINSZTEIN, and W. AMOS, 1999 Markov chain Monte Carlo analysis of human Y-chromosome microsatellites provides evidence of mutation bias. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 96:11916-11921
CORNUET, J.-M. and G. LUIKART, 1996 Description and power analysis of two tests for detecting recent population bottlenecks from allele frequency data. Genetics 144:2001-2014[Abstract].
DIB, C., S. FAURE, C. FIZAMES, D. SAMSON, and N. DROUOT et al., 1996 A comprehensive map of the human genome based on 5,264 microsatellites. Nature 380:152-154[Medline].
DONNELLY, P. and S. TAVARÉ, 1995 Coalescents and genealogical structure under neutrality. Annu. Rev. Genet. 29:410-421.
EASTEAL, S., 1981 The history of introductions of Bufo marinus (Amphibia: Anura); a natural experiment in evolution. Biol. J. Lin. Soc. 16:93-113.
EASTEAL, S., 1985 The genetics of introduced populations of the giant toad Bufo marinus: III. Geographical patterns of variation. Evolution 39:1065-1075.
EASTEAL, S. and R. D. FLOYD, 1986 The ecological genetics of introduced populations of the giant toad, Bufo marinus (Amphibia: Anura): dispersal and neighborhood size. Lin. Soc. Lond. 27:17-45.
ELLEGREN, H., 2000 Heterogeneous mutation processes in human microsatellite DNA sequences. Nat. Genet. 24:400-402[Medline].
ESTOUP, A., and B. ANGERS, 1998 Microsatellites and minisatellites for molecular ecology: theoretical and empirical considerations, pp. 5586 in Advances in Molecular Ecology, edited by G. CARVALHO. NATO Press, Amsterdam.
ESTOUP, A., and J.-M. CORNUET, 1999 Microsatellite evolution: inferences from population data, pp. 5065 in Microsatellites: Evolution and Applications, edited by D. B. GOLDSTEIN and C. SCHLÖTTERER. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
ESTOUP, A., C. L. LARGIADER, E. PERROT, and D. CHOURROUT, 1996 Rapid one-tube DNA extraction for reliable PCR detection of fish polymorphic markers and transgenes. Mol. Mar. Biol. Biotech. 5:295-298.
ESTOUP, A., F. ROUSSET, J.-M. CORNUET, and R. GUYOMARD, 1999 Juxtaposed microsatellites as diagnostic markers for genetic introgression: theoretical aspects. Mol. Biol. Evol. 16:898-908.
FELDMAN, M. W., A. BERGMAN, D. D. POLLOCK, and D. B. GOLDSTEIN, 1997 Microsatellite genetic distances with range constraints: analytic description and problems of estimation. Genetics 145:207-216[Abstract].
FREELAND, W. J., 1986 Population of the cane toad, Bufo marinus, in relation to time since colonization. Aust. Wildl. Res. 13:321-330.
FU, Y.-X. and W.-H. LI, 1999 Coalescing into the 21st century: an overview and prospects of coalescent theory. Theor. Popul. Biol. 56:1-10[Medline].
GOLDSTEIN, D. B., A. R. LINARES, M. W. FELDMAN, and L. L. CAVALLI-SFORZA, 1995 Genetic absolute dating based on microsatellites and the origin of modern humans. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 92:6723-6727
GONSER, R., P. DONNELY, G. NICHOLSON, and A. DI RIENZO, 2000 Microsatellite mutations and inferences about human demography. Genetics 154:1793-1807
HILBORN, R., and M. MANGEL, 1997 The Ecological Detective: Confronting Models With Data. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
HUDSON, R. R., 1991 Gene genealogies and the coalescent process, pp. 144 in Oxford Surveys in Evolutionary Biology, edited by D. J. FUTUYAMA and J. ANTONOVICS. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
INGVARSSON, P. K. and M. C. WHITLOCK, 2000 Heterosis increases the effective migration rate. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. Ser. B 267:1321-1326[Medline].
KIMMEL, M. and R. CHAKRABORTY, 1996 Measures of variation at DNS repeat loci under a general stepwise mutation model. Theor. Popul. Biol. 50:345-367[Medline].
KIMMEL, M., R. CHAKRABORTY, J. P. KING, M. BAMSHAD, and W. S. WATKINS et al., 1998 Signatures of population expansion in microsatellite repeat data. Genetics 148:1921-1930
KIMURA, M. and J. F. CROW, 1964 The number of alleles that can be maintained in a finite population. Genetics 49:725-738
KINGMAN, J. F. C., 1982 The coalescent. Stoch. Proc. Appl. 13:235-248.
LEBLOIS, R., F. ROUSSET, D. TIKEL, C. MORITZ, and A. ESTOUP, 2000 Absence of evidence for isolation by distance in an expanding cane toad (Bufo marinus) population: an individual-based analysis of microsatellite genotypes. Mol. Ecol. 9:1905-1909[Medline].
LE CORRE, V. and A. KREMER, 1998 Cumulative effects of founding events during colonisation on genetic diversity and differentiation in an island and stepping-stone model. J. Evol. Biol. 11:495-512.
MARUYAMA, T. and P. A. FUERST, 1985 Population bottlenecks and nonequilibrium models in population genetics. II. Number of alleles in a small population that was formed by a recent bottleneck. Genetics 111:675-689
MUKAI, T. and C. C. COCKERHAM, 1977 Spontaneous mutation rates at enzyme loci in Drosophila melanogaster. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 74:2514-2517
NEEL, J. V., C. SATOH, K. GORIKI, M. FUJITA, and N. TAKAHASHI et al., 1986 The rate with which spontaneous mutation alters the electrophoretic mobility of polypeptides. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 83:389-393
NEI, M., 1987 Molecular Evolutionary Genetics. Columbia University Press, New York.





