Hal Stern, University of California Irivine

ASSESSMENT OF ANCESTRY PROBABILITIES IN THE PRESENCE OF GENOTYPING ERRORS

It is often of interest in the agricultural seed industry and in other contexts to attempt to determine the ancestry of a particular organism. A probabilistic approach has been proposed by a group at Pioneer Hi-Bred International, Inc. The work presented here extends their approach for estimating the ancestry probability, the probability that an inbred line is an ancestor of a given hybrid, to account for genotyping errors. The effect of such errors on ancestry probability estimates is evaluated through simulation. The simulation study shows that if misclassification is ignored, then ancestry probabilities may be slightly overestimated. The sensitivity of ancestry probability calculations to the assumed genotyping error rate is assessed and likelihood-based approaches to simultaneously inferring the error rate and the ancestry probabilities are considered. (This is joint work with Hongmei Zhang, University of West Florida.)