On the Effect of Fluctuating Recombination Rates on the Decorrelation of Gene Histories in the Human Genome

We show how to incorporate fluctuations of the recombination rate along the chromosome into standard gene-genealogical models for the decorrelation of gene histories. This enables us to determine how small-scale fluctuations (Poissonian hot-spot model) and large-scale variations (Kong et al. 2002) of the recombination rate influence this decorrelation. We find that the empirically determined large-scale variations of the recombination rate give rise to a significantly slower decay of correlations compared to the standard, unstructured gene-genealogical model assuming constant recombination rate. A model with long-range recombination-rate variations and with demographic structure (divergent population) is found to be consistent with the empirically observed slow decorrelation of gene histories. Conversely, we show that small-scale recombination-rate fluctuations do not alter the large-scale decorrelation of gene histories.