Analysis of DNA diversity by spatial autocorrelation

Abstract

Two statistics are proposed for summarizing spatial patterns of DNA diversity. These autocorrelation indices for DNA analysis, or AIDAs, can be applied to RFLP and sequence data; the resulting set of autocorrelation coefficients, or correlogram, measures whether, and to what extent, individual DNA sequences or haplotypes resemble the haplotypes sampled at arbitrarily chosen spatial distances. Analyses of computer-generated sets of data, and of RFLP data from two natural populations, show that AIDAs allow one to objectively and simply identify basic patterns in the spatial distribution of haplotypes. These statistics, therefore, seem to be a useful tool both to explore the genetic structure of a population and to suggest hypotheses on the evolutionary processes that shaped the observed patterns.