Abstract
There is a long-going debate on the genetic origin of Chinese Muslim populations, such as Uygur, Dongxiang, and Hui. However, genetic information for those Muslim populations except Uygur is extremely limited. In this study, we investigated the genetic structure and ancestry of Chinese Muslims by analyzing 15 autosomal short tandem repeats in 652 individuals from Dongxiang, Hui, and Han Chinese populations in Gansu province. Both genetic distance and Bayesian-clustering methods showed significant genetic homogeneity between the two Muslim populations and East Asian populations, suggesting a common genetic ancestry. Our analysis found no evidence of substantial gene flow from Middle East or Europe into Dongxiang and Hui people during their Islamization. The dataset generated in present study are also valuable for forensic identification and paternity tests in China.
Highlights
Chinese Muslim populations refer to ten officially recognized Muslim ethnic groups, which are Uygur, Dongxiang, Hui, Bo’an, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Salar, Tatar, Tajik, and Uzbek
In the test of Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium (HWE), the genotype frequency distributions showed no significant deviations from expectations except p-value of 0.030 at D19S433 locus in Hui
The highest probability of paternity exclusion (PPE) was found at D6S1043 locus in Dongxiang (0.824), with the lowest found at CSF1PO locus in Hui (0.410)
Summary
Chinese Muslim populations refer to ten officially recognized Muslim ethnic groups, which are Uygur, Dongxiang, Hui, Bo’an, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Salar, Tatar, Tajik, and Uzbek. The origin of those populations via demic diffusion involves mass movement of people or simple cultural diffusion is a long-going debate. Uygur has already been proven to be a typical admixture of East Asian and European by genome-wide scan[2]. The paternal Y chromosomal STR clustering has put Hui of Liaoning and Ningxia into the group of Han Chinese and Tibeto-Burman populations[7]. About 24–30% Y chromosomes of Salar, Bo’an, and Dongxiang belong to East Asian specific haplogroup O3-M122.
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