Data from: Population assignment in autopolyploids

Understanding patterns of contemporary gene dispersal within and among
populations is of critical importance to population genetics and in
managing populations for conservation. In contrast to diploids, there are
few studies of gene dispersal in autopolyploids, in part due to complex
polysomic inheritance and genotype ambiguity. Here we develop a novel
approach for population assignment for codominant markers for
autotetraploids and autohexaploids. This method accounts for polysomic
inheritance, unreduced gametes and unknown allele dosage. It can also
utilize information regarding the origin and genotype of one parent for
population assignment of maternal or paternal parents. Using simulations,
we demonstrate that our approach achieves high levels of accuracy for
assignment even when population divergence is low (FST ~ 0.06) and with
only twelve microsatellite loci. We also show that substantially higher
accuracy is achieved when known maternal information is utilized,
regardless of whether allele dosage is known. Although this novel method
exhibited near identical levels of accuracy to Structure when population
divergence was high, it performed substantially better for most parameters
at moderate (FST = 0.06) to low levels of divergence (FST = 0.03). These
methods fill an important gap in the toolset for autopolyploids and pave
the way for investigating contemporary gene dispersal in a widespread
group of organisms.