Approaches to estimating inbreeding coefficients in clinical isolates of Plasmodium falciparum from genomic sequence data.

Background The advent of whole-genome sequencing has generated increased interest in modelling the structure of strain mixture within clinical infections of Plasmodium falciparum The life cycle of the parasite implies that the mixture of multiple strains within an infected individual is related to the out-crossing rate across populations, making methods for measuring this process in situ central to understanding the genetic epidemiology of the disease.