ArticleHeredity2019
Subsampling reveals that unbalanced sampling affects STRUCTURE results in a multi-species dataset.
Article in Heredity, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
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26 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Divergent ancestry of Korean native and Thai chickens with independent gene pool retention by Korean commercial chickens.Animal bioscience · 2026Article
- Resolving sampling and population-size biases in domestication genomics supports a South Asian origin of walnuts.Genome biology · 2026Article
- Genetic structure of traditional cacao reveals four new genetic lineages in indigenous Amazonian sites in Peru.PloS one · 2026Article
- Hybridization and introgression between two fig trees with contrasting ecological preferences.BMC ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Noninvasive sampling reveals landscape genetic structure in the threatened ghost bat (Macroderma gigas) in an ore-rich region of Western Australia.The Journal of heredity · 2025Article
- Standing genetic variation and introgression shape the cryptic radiation of Aquilegia in the mountains of Southwest China.Communications biology · 2025Article
- On the tracks of an uninvited guest, the Asian tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus in Cyprus.Parasites & vectors · 2025Article
- Genetic diversity of Anadara tuberculosa in two localities of the Colombian Pacific Coast.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The hindgut microbiota of coconut rhinoceros beetles (Applied and environmental microbiology · 2024Article
- Continent-wide genomic analysis of the African buffalo (Syncerus caffer).Communications biology · 2024Article
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- Polygenic routes lead to parallel altitudinal adaptation in Heliosperma pusillum (Caryophyllaceae).Molecular ecology · 2023Article
- Climate-induced range shifts drive adaptive response via spatio-temporal sieving of alleles.Nature communications · 2023Article
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- Absence of genetic isolation across highly fragmented landscape in the ant Temnothorax nigriceps.BMC ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Population-genomic analyses reveal bottlenecks and asymmetric introgression from Persian into iron walnut during domestication.Genome biology · 2022Article
- Dead-End Hybridization in Walnut Trees Revealed by Large-Scale Genomic Sequence Data.Molecular biology and evolution · 2022Article
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Abstract
Studying the genetic population structure of species can reveal important insights into several key evolutionary, historical, demographic, and anthropogenic processes. One of the most important statistical tools for inferring genetic clusters is the program STRUCTURE. Recently, several papers have pointed out that STRUCTURE may show a bias when the sampling design is unbalanced, resulting in spurious joining of underrepresented populations and spurious separation of overrepresented populations. Suggestions to overcome this bias include subsampling and changing the ancestry model, but the performance of these two methods has not yet been tested on actual data. Here, I use a data set of 12 high-alpine plant species to test whether unbalanced sampling affects the STRUCTURE inference of population differentiation between the European Alps and the Carpathians. For four of the 12 species, subsampling of the Alpine populations-to match the sample size between the Alps and the Carpathians-resulted in a drastically different clustering than the full data set. On the other hand, STRUCTURE results with the alternative ancestry model were indistinguishable from the results with the default model. Based on these results, the subsampling strategy seems a more viable approach to overcome the bias than the alternative ancestry model. However, subsampling is only possible when there is an a priori expectation of what constitute the main clusters. Though these results do not mean that the use of STRUCTURE should be discarded, it does indicate that users of the software should be cautious about the interpretation of the results when sampling is unbalanced.
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