A brief history and popularity of methods and tools used to estimate
micro-evolutionary forces
Abstract
Enabled by rapid advances in sequencing technologies, population
genetics currently experiences a second boom. Established approaches are
being adapted to new marker systems, and new methods are developed that
allow genome-wide estimates of the four major micro-evolutionary forces
– mutation, gene flow, genetic drift and selection. Nevertheless,
classic population genetic markers are still commonly used and a
plethora of analysis methods and programs are available. With these
diverse ranges of datasets and methods, various theoretical and
statistical frameworks are employed to varying degrees of success in
estimating similar evolutionary parameters making it difficult to get a
concise overview across the available approaches. Presently, reviews on
this topic generally focus on a particular class of methods to estimate
one or two evolutionary parameters. Here, we provide a brief history of
methods and a comprehensive list of available programs for estimating
micro-evolutionary forces. We furthermore analysed their usage within
the research community based on popularity (citation bias) and discuss
the implications of this bias on the software community. We found that a
few programs received the majority of citations, with program success
being independent of both the parameters estimated and the computing
platform. The only deviation from a model of exponential growth in the
number of citations was found for the presence of a graphical user
interface (GUI). Hence, developers should consider implementing GUIs in
their programs in order to promote them.