The homozygosity test of neutrality

Abstract

An earlier paper showed that the homozygosity (of a population or sample) was a good statistic for testing departures from selective neutrality in the direction of heterozygote advantage or disadvantage. It is here shown that homozygosity is also influenced by the presence of deleterious alleles and by other departures from neutrality, but at a lower order of magnitude of effect if the selection coefficients are of the same small order of magnitude. Tables are provided for the significance points and moments of the homozygosity, under the null hypothesis of neutrality.