Allele trees for the mother-dependent neutral mutations model and their scaling limits in the rare mutations regime

Abstract: The mother-dependent neutral mutations model describes the evolution of a population across discrete generations, where neutral mutations occur among a finite set of possible alleles. In this model, each mutant child acquires a type different from that of its mother, chosen uniformly at random. In this work, we define a multitype allele tree associated with this model and analyze its scaling limit through a Markov chain that tracks the sizes of allelic subfamilies and their mutant descendants. We show that this Markov chain converges to a continuous-state Markov process, whose transition probabilities depend on the sizes of the initial allelic populations and those of their mutant offspring in the first allelic generation. As a result, the allele tree converges to a multidimensional limiting object, which can be described in terms of the universal allele tree introduced by Bertoin (2010).