Incorporating uniparental markers and demographic information in kinship analysis

Knowledge of kinship relations between members of wild populations is of great importance in ecological and conservation genetic studies. The bi-parentally inherited autosomal markers has been the Golden Standard in kinship analysis. However, analysis of kin relationship can be challenging in wild populations. The uni-parentally inherited markers and population demographic information can be helpful for identifying false-positive in kinship analysis. Here we showed how incorporating uniparental genetic and demographic information can improve the correct classification rate of kinship analyses by reanalyzing data of a recent study published in Science Advances. The application of next generation high-throughput sequencing to address fundamental ecological questions is of immense benefit to the field of molecular ecology, which could also generate uniparentally inherited organelle genomes together with nuclear data. We strongly recommended that uniparental genetic markers and demographic information be seriously considered in kinship analyses of wild populations.