MLNe: Simulating and estimating effective size and migration rate from temporal changes in allele frequencies

Area of Science:

• Molecular ecology
• Conservation biology
• Evolutionary biology

Background:

• Estimating population effective size (Ne) is crucial for understanding population dynamics.
• Current methods often struggle to jointly estimate Ne and migration rates (m) using spatio-temporal data.

Purpose of the Study:

• Introduce new software, MLNe, for joint estimation of Ne and m.
• Provide a tool to analyze temporal genetic marker data for population management.

Main Methods:

• MLNe implements joint estimators for Ne and m from temporally and spatially spaced samples.
• The software includes a simulation module to assess estimation accuracy and precision.
• It supports parallel computations (MPI, OpenMP) for faster analysis and handles various input formats without pre-processing.

Main Results:

• MLNe offers a user-friendly interface (GUI) for data input and visualization.
• The non-GUI version facilitates batch analysis for simulations.
• The software enhances the analysis of temporal genetic marker data.

Conclusions:

• MLNe advances the estimation of key population genetic parameters (Ne and m).
• This tool will support more effective conservation and management strategies for natural and managed populations.