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Concept
Effective population size
Summary
The effective population size (Ne) is a number that, in some simplified scenarios, corresponds to the number of breeding individuals in the population. More generally, Ne is the number of individuals that an idealised population would need to have in order for some specified quantity of interest (typically change of genetic diversity or inbreeding rates) to be the same as in the real population. Idealised populations are based on unrealistic but convenient simplifications such as random mating, simultaneous birth of each new generation, constant population size, and equal numbers of children per parent. For most quantities of interest and most real populations, the effective population size Ne is usually smaller than the census population size N of a real population. The same population may have multiple effective population sizes, for different properties of interest, including for different genetic loci.
The effective population size is most commonly measured with respect to the coalescence time. In an idealised diploid population with no selection at any locus, the expectation of the coalescence time in generations is equal to twice the census population size. The effective population size is measured as within-species genetic diversity divided by four times the mutation rate , because in such an idealised population, the heterozygosity is equal to . In a population with selection at many loci and abundant linkage disequilibrium, the coalescent effective population size may not reflect the census population size at all, or may reflect its logarithm.
The concept of effective population size was introduced in the field of population genetics in 1931 by the American geneticist Sewall Wright.
Depending on the quantity of interest, effective population size can be defined in several ways. Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright originally defined it as "the number of breeding individuals in an idealised population that would show the same amount of dispersion of allele frequencies under random genetic drift or the same amount of inbreeding as the population under consideration".
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