Variance and covariance of actual relationships between relatives at one locus.

Abstract

The relationship between pairs of individuals is an important topic in many areas of population and quantitative genetics. It is usually measured as the proportion of the genome identical by descent shared by the pair and it can be inferred from pedigree information. But there is a variance in actual relationships as a consequence of mendelian sampling, whose general formula has not been developed. The goal of this work is to develop this general formula for the one-locus situation,. We provide simple expressions for the variances and covariances of all actual relationships in an arbitrary complex pedigree. The proposed method relies on the use of the nine identity coefficients and the generalized relationship coefficients; formulas have been checked by computer simulation. Finally two examples for a short pedigree of dogs and a long pedigree of sheep are given.