Many analyses of genetic data can be framed in terms of allelic associations: quantifying inbreeding, relatedness and population structure,  as well as association mapping of quantitative traits. There are well-established methods and software packages for these analyses, but methods that make use of sample allele frequencies can give results that are confounded by inbreeding and relatedness in the study sample. This short course will explore the use of alternative methods based on allele-sharing and discuss situations where the results are robust to association estimation (e.g. heritability estimation) or susceptible to confounding (e.g. inbreeding depression estimation). The work in recent papers will be covered and augmented by Bayesian approaches.

All practical sessions will be in R. Make sure you have R (we suggest Rstudio too) installed and you are familiar running it on your laptop before the workshop.

For a more detailed programme, see here (pdf)

 - Dates: Tuesday 9 morning to Friday 12 April noon 2024

 - Event Address: PFR Ōtautahi, Fitzgerald Room - 74 Gerald Street, Lincoln, NZ (Google Map link)

 - Instructors: Bruce Weir, University of Washington and Massey University, https://www.biostat.washington.edu/people/bruce-weir and Matthieu Vignes, Massey University https://www.massey.ac.nz/massey/expertise/profile.cfm?stref=651350

 - Topics covered: allele frequency estimation, Hardy Weinberg testing, inbreeding and relatedness estimation, population structure, Bayesian models for population genetics

 - Cost: free, but mandatory registration (limited to 30 participants)

 - Accommodation and travel: own arrangement