Avoidable false PSMC population size peaks occur across numerous studies

Inferring historical population sizes is key to identifying drivers of ecological and evolutionary change and crucial to predicting the future of species on our rapidly changing planet. The pairwise sequentially Markovian coalescent (PSMC) method provided a revolutionary framework to reconstruct species' demographic histories over millions of years based on the genome sequence of a single individual. Here, we detected and solved a common artifact in PSMC and related methods: recent population peaks followed by population collapses. Combining real and simulated genomes, we show that these peaks do not represent true population dynamics. Instead, ill-set default parameters cause false peaks in our own and…

• HM
  Hessisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kunst

  Awards: 519/03/03.001, LOEWE/1/10/519/03/03.001(0014)/52
• V
  Vetenskapsrådet

  Award: 2020-03398