Analysis of genetic admixture in Uyghur using the 26 Y-STR loci system.

Yingnan Bian,Siqintuya Siqintuya,Qi Zhao,Zheng Wang,Wei Zhou,Suhua Zhang,Yuzhen Gao,Ruxin Zhu,Chengtao Li,Daru Lu,Jie Hong

doi:10.1038/srep19998

Abstract

The Uyghur population has experienced extensive interaction with European and Eastern Asian populations historically. A set of high-resolution genetic markers could be useful to infer the genetic relationships between the Uyghur population and European and Asian populations. In this study we typed 100 unrelated Uyghur males living in southern Xinjiang at 26 Y-STR loci. Using the high-resolution 26 Y-STR loci system, we investigated genetic and phylogenetic relationship between the Uyghur population and 23 reference European or Asian populations. We found that the Uyghur population exhibited a genetic admixture of Eastern Asian and European populations, and had a slightly closer relationship with the selected European populations than the Eastern Asian populations. We also demonstrated that the 26 Y-STR loci system was potentially useful in forensic sciences because it has a large power of discrimination and rarely exhibits common haplotypes. However, ancestry inference of Uyghur samples could be challenging due to the admixed nature of the population.

Highlights

Uyghurs live primarily in Xinjiang, a province in the far western region of China and crossed by the Silk Road which is an important pathway connecting Eastern Asia with Central Asia and Europe
Using the high-resolution Y chromosome STRs (Y-STRs) loci system, we studied the genetic relationship of Uyghur and different Asian or European populations (Table 1) based on RST (Table 2), and multidimensional scaling (MDS) was used to visualize the results (Fig. 2A)
Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that both Eastern Asian and European populations contributed to the current gene pool of the Uyghur population

Summary

Introduction

Uyghurs live primarily in Xinjiang, a province in the far western region of China and crossed by the Silk Road which is an important pathway connecting Eastern Asia with Central Asia and Europe. To shed light on the historical interactions of the Uyghurs with the Europeans and Eastern Asians, a high-resolution genetic dataset as well as detailed population genetics and phylogenetic analyses based on the dataset are needed Such a high-resolution dataset is potentially useful in forensic applications either within Uyghur populations or to infer ancestry of DNA donors. A number of highly polymorphic Y chromosome STRs (Y-STRs) systems are useful and available for studies in population genetics and forensic sciences such as patrilineal relationship evaluation, mixture identification and ancestry inference[5,6,7,8,9] Such Y-STRs systems have been successfully applied to Uyghur populations[10,11,12,13]. We presented and compared forensic parameters for different Y-STR systems and discussed the potential application of the Y-STR loci system to infer ancestry of DNA donors that are potentially from a admixed population, like Uyghur

Methods

Results

Conclusion