Coalescent Theory

In genetics, coalescent theory is a retrospective model of population genetics. It attempts to trace all alleles of a gene shared by all members of a population to a single ancestral copy, 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.

The coalescent runs models of genetic drift backward in time to investigate the genealogy of antecedents. 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.