R-ST CALC - A COLLECTION OF COMPUTER-PROGRAMS FOR CALCULATING ESTIMATES OF GENETIC DIFFERENTIATION FROM MICROSATELLITE DATA AND DETERMININGTHEIR SIGNIFICANCE

R-ST, an analogue of F-ST, provides a convenient approach for estimati ng levels of genetic differentiation from microsatellite data. This pa per examines current approaches for calculating estimates of R-ST and suggests a weighting scheme based on the transformation of allele size s at loci across data sets. Combined within an analysis of variance fr amework this scheme yields an estimator of R-ST analogous to the theta estimator of F-ST. Software for the IBM-PC is described which carries out such calculations and assesses the significance of R-ST or Nm est imates using bootstrap and permutation tests.