Parentage and sibship inference from markers in polyploids

Many plants and some animal species are polyploids. Non-disomically inherited markers (e.g. microsatellites) in such species cannot be analysed directly by standard population genetics methods developed for diploid species. One solution is to transform the polyploid codominant genotypes to pseudo diploid dominant genotypes, which can then be analysed by standard methods for various purposes such as spatial genetic structure, individual relatedness and relationship. Although this data transformation approach has been used repeatedly in the literature, no systematic study has been conducted to investigate how efficient it is, how much marker information is lost and thus how much analysis accuracy is reduced. More specifically, it is unknown whether or not the transformed data can be used to infer parentage and sibship jointly, and how different sampling schemes (number and polymorphism of markers, number of individuals) and ploidy level affect the inference accuracy. This study analyzes b...