In
genetics, coalescent theory is a retrospective model of population genetics that traces all
alleles of a
gene in a sample from a population to a single ancestral copy shared by all members of the population, known as the
most recent common ancestor (MRCA; sometimes also termed the coancestor to emphasize the coalescent relationship). The inheritance relationships between alleles are typically represented as a gene genealogy, similar in form to a
phylogenetic tree. This gene genealogy is also known as the coalescent; understanding the statistical properties of the coalescent under different assumptions forms the basis of coalescent theory. In the most simple case, coalescent theory assumes no
recombination, no
natural selection, and no
gene flow or population structure. Advances in coalescent theory, however, allow extension to the basic coalescent, and can include recombination, selection, and virtually any arbitrarily complex evolutionary or demographic model in population genetic analysis. The mathematical theory of the coalescent was originally developed in the early 1980s by
John Kingman.
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The evolutionary theory that estimates the time for divergence from the last common ancestor.
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