Population-Genetic Influences on Genomic Estimates of the Inbreeding Coefficient: A Global Perspective

Culturally driven marital practices provide a key instance of an interaction between social and genetic processes in shaping patterns of human genetic variation, producing, for example, increased identity by descent through consanguineous marriage. A commonly used measure to quantify identity by descent in an individual is the inbreeding coefficient, a quantity that reflects not only consanguinity, but also other aspects of kinship in the population to which the individual belongs. Here, in populations worldwide, we examine the relationship between genomic estimates of the inbreeding coefficient and population patterns in genetic variation.