The similarity index and DNA fingerprinting

DNA-fingerprint similarity is being used increasingly to make inferences about levels of genetic variation within and between natural populations. It is shown that the similarity index-the average fraction of shared restriction fragments-provides upwardly biased estimates of population homozygosity but nearly unbiased estimates of the average identity-in-state for random pairs of individuals. A method is suggested for partitioning the DNA-fingerprint dissimilarity into within- and between-population components. Some simple expressions are given for the sampling variances of these estimators.