Genetic diversity in populations

Genetic diversity accumulates over time on the level of DNA sequence with accumulation of mutations. It is additionally increased with population admixture, and the decrease in genetic diversity is often the first indication of detrimental processes affecting populations, such as reduction in the number of breeding individuals or breeding of close relatives. Nucleotide diversity shows how different the sequences of a given gene are in a population. Gene diversity estimates how likely two individuals are to share the same sequence of a gene. Number of alleles is the count of different versions of a gene with differing sequences, and this is corrected for sample size in estimation of allelic richness. Heterozygosity is the average frequency that an individual will have two different copies of a gene