Very large long-term effective population size in the virulent human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum.
Hughes, AL;
Verra, F;
(2001)
Very large long-term effective population size in the virulent human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum.
Proceedings Biological sciences / The Royal Society, 268 (1478).
pp. 1855-1860.
ISSN 0962-8452
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2001.1759
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It has been proposed that the virulent human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum underwent a recent severe population bottleneck. In order to test this hypothesis, we estimated the effective population size of this species from the patterns of nucleotide substitution at 23 nuclear protein-coding loci, using a variety of methods based on coalescent theory. Both simple methods and phylogenetically based maximum-likelihood methods yielded the conclusion that the effective population size of this species has been of the order of at least 10(5) for the past 300,000-400,000 years.
