Diversidade genética a partir de dados computacionais simulados para fins de conservação em populações naturais sob deriva genética

Abstract

The rupture of a landscape unit that was initially continuous through anthropic action of devastation defines the process of forest fragmentation. As a consequence, the remaining units of the process are disconnected, presenting different sizes and subject to a series of deleterious effects as is the case of genetic drift. The drift significantly affects the frequency of the genes, causing them to be removed from the original population, and in a more extreme way contributes to the loss of alleles. Genetic studies of natural populations seek to evaluate and quantify how genetic variability is distributed in time and space. However, in the forest sector there are few methodologies to be followed and the implementation of studies in the area demands high costs. Therefore, the use of data simulation in the area of population genetics provides the development of new statistical methods to aid in the analysis of diversity, defines processes of population history and structure, in order to predict allelic and genotype frequencies. The objective of this study is to test different biometric procedures by simulating data from computational programs in order to aid in inferences regarding the conservation of the genetic resources of natural populations under conditions of genetic drift. It was observed that descriptive biometric variables such as observed heterozygosity (Ho) and expected heterozygosity (He) are efficient parameters to differentiate increase of heterozygotes in populations with genetic drift effect and that the methodologies tested are good indicators to differentiate populations that undergo processes that affect the gene frequencies.