Relative accuracy of three common methods of parentage analysis in natural populations

Parentage studies and family reconstructions have become increasingly popular for investigating a range of evolutionary, ecological and behavioral processes in natural populations. However, a number of different assignment methods have emerged in common use, and the accuracy of each may differ in relation to the number of loci examined, allelic diversity, incomplete sampling of all candidate parents, and the presence of genotyping errors. Here we examine how these factors affect the accuracy of three popular parentage inference methods (COLONY, FaMoz and an exclusion-Bayes’ theorem approach by Christie et al. (2010a)) to resolve true parent-offspring pairs using simulated data. Our findings demonstrate that accuracy increases with the number and diversity of loci. These were clearly the most important factors in obtaining accurate assignments explaining 75-90% of variance in overall accuracy across 60 simulated scenarios. Furthermore, the proportion of candidate parents sampled had a sm...