Ancestral inference from DNA sequences using the coalescent process

Since the introduction of coalescent theory by J.F.C. Kingman in 1982, the mainstream of theoretical population genetics changed from a prospective to a retrospective point of view. The focus is now the reconstruction of aspects of evolutionary history from a molecular population sample. Coalescent theory describes the evolution of such a sample backwards in time, and provides a probabilistic description of the events that occured in the genealogy since the most recent common ancestor of the sample.

In this talk I will give a short introduction to the coalescent process and its use in modelling the evolution of a sample of a population. However, the main part of this talk will be dealing with the challenging task of infering demographic aspects of the population the sample stems from.