IceLab seminar: Ondřej Mikula

Boundaries of biological species can be revealed by study of variation in genealogies across different genomic loci. The coancestry matrix is a summary of individual affinities observed in these genealogies. It can be thought as defining a fully connected network, whose nodes are individual genotypes and edge weights are the co-ancestries. Conspecific individuals, which inherited genomes from the same gene pool, are expected to be densely connected and form distinct clusters in the network. Clusters provided by Infomap software typically represent sensible hypotheses about species limits. It appears the map equation criterion does exactly the same job as a good taxonomist reviewing her group of interest. It avoids introducing a new species if it makes description of the whole diversity in the group unnecessarily complicated.