Detecting hidden genetic relationships in animal populations

Understanding biological relationships is often critical when studying animal populations. Researchers have now developed a transformative approach that identifies stretches of DNA that two individuals inherited from a common ancestor. The team successfully applied their new tool to a free-ranging population of rhesus macaques. The results show that even for low-quality sequencing data, this method can accurately determine relatedness among pairs of individuals, even without prior knowledge of pedigrees within the population. This breakthrough helps to reveal previously unknown pairs of relatives and provides rich insights into population structure in the wild.