The distribution of the time to the most recent pairwise genetic common ancestor of a set of sampled genomes

Abstract

In a sample of chromosomes from a recombining population, each pair of individuals will have different most recent common genetic ancestors at different loci. We consider the distribution of the time to the most recent of these most recent common ancestors--the most recent time at which any pair of individuals in the sample share a common genetic ancestor at any locus. We use simple heuristic arguments, formal calculations, and coalescent simulations to find that as long as the chromosomal map length R is sufficiently long and the sample size n is not too large, the distribution of this time is peaked around a characteristic value. This value has the unusual scaling [Formula], where N is the effective size of the population.