Sherwin William B, Jabot Franck, Rush Rebecca, Rossetto Maurizio
School of Biological Earth and Environmental Science, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia.
Mol Ecol. 2006 Sep;15(10):2857-69. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-294X.2006.02992.x.
Biological diversity is quantified for reasons ranging from primer design, to bioprospecting, and community ecology. As a common index for all levels, we suggest Shannon's (S)H, already used in information theory and biodiversity of ecological communities. Since Lewontin's first use of this index to describe human genetic variation, it has been used for variation of viruses, splice-junctions, and informativeness of pedigrees. However, until now there has been no theory to predict expected values of this index under given genetic and demographic conditions. We present a new null theory for (S)H at the genetic level, and show that this index has advantages including (i) independence of measures at each hierarchical level of organization; (ii) robust estimation of genetic exchange over a wide range of conditions; (iii) ability to incorporate information on population size; and (iv) explicit relationship to standard statistical tests. Utilization of this index in conjunction with other existing indices offers powerful insights into genetic processes. Our genetic theory is also extendible to the ecological community level, and thus can aid the comparison and integration of diversity at the genetic and community levels, including the need for measures of community diversity that incorporate the genetic differentiation between species.
对生物多样性进行量化的原因多种多样，从引物设计到生物勘探以及群落生态学等方面都有涉及。作为适用于所有层次的通用指标，我们建议采用香农（Shannon）的（S）H，它已在信息论和生态群落生物多样性中得到应用。自从莱温廷首次使用该指标来描述人类遗传变异以来，它已被用于病毒变异、剪接连接以及系谱的信息性研究。然而，到目前为止，尚无理论能够预测在给定的遗传和人口统计学条件下该指标的期望值。我们提出了一种关于遗传水平上（S）H的新零模型理论，并表明该指标具有诸多优势，包括：（i）在组织的每个层次水平上测量的独立性；（ii）在广泛条件下对遗传交换的稳健估计；（iii）纳入种群大小信息的能力；以及（iv）与标准统计检验的明确关系。将该指标与其他现有指标结合使用，能够为遗传过程提供强有力的见解。我们的遗传理论也可扩展到生态群落水平，从而有助于在遗传和群落水平上对多样性进行比较和整合，包括对纳入物种间遗传分化的群落多样性测量的需求。
