Selection, recombination, and the ancestral initiation graph.

Abstract Recently, the selection-recombination equation with a single selected site and an arbitrary number of neutral sites was solved by Alberti and Baake (2021) by means of the ancestral selection-recombination graph. Here, we introduce a more accessible approach, namely the ancestral initiation graph. The construction is based on a discretisation of the selection-recombination equation. We apply our method to systematically explain a long-standing observation concerning the dynamics of linkage disequilibrium between two neutral loci hitchhiking along with a selected one. In particular, this clarifies the nontrivial dependence on the position of the selected site.