Abstract
Mennonites are Anabaptist communities that originated in Central Europe about 500 years ago. They initially migrated to different European countries, and in the early 18th century they established their first communities in North America, from where they moved to other American regions. We aimed to analyze an Argentinean Mennonite congregation from a genome-wide perspective by way of investigating >580.000 autosomal SNPs. Several analyses show that Argentinean Mennonites have European ancestry without signatures of admixture with other non-European American populations. Among the worldwide datasets used for population comparison, the CEU, which is the best-subrogated Central European population existing in The 1000 Genome Project, is the dataset showing the closest genome affinity to the Mennonites. When compared to other European population samples, the Mennonites show higher inbreeding coefficient values. Argentinean Mennonites show signatures of genetic continuity with no evidence of admixture with Americans of Native American or sub-Saharan African ancestry. Their genome indicates the existence of an increased endogamy compared to other Europeans most likely mirroring their lifestyle that involve small communities and historical consanguineous marriages.
Highlights
Anabaptists represent a Christian movement that traces its origins to the 16th century, at the time of the Radical Reformation in Europe
The founding members of ‘La Nueva Esperanza’ originated from the Mexican and Bolivian communities, and belong to the Anabaptist branch known as Ältkolonier Reinlaender Mennoniten Gemeinde (ÄRMG) or ‘The Community of Mennonites from the Old Colony of
This study revealed that the Y-chromosomes of Mennonites from ‘La Nueva Esperanza’ are genetically related to populations living in Central Europe, with the Netherlands being the population that best represents the genetic background of this community
Summary
Anabaptists represent a Christian movement that traces its origins to the 16th century, at the time of the Radical Reformation in Europe. The Mennonites separated from the Amish already in the late 1600’s, and they slightly diverged from Amish in regards to their costumes and lifestyle (http://jamesportmissouri.org/index.html, refs 2 and 3). Their denomination comes from the Anabaptist religious leader Menno Simons (1596–1561). The Argentinean Mennonite Colony ‘La Nueva Esperanza’ was established in the mid 1980s in the Department of Guatraché, in La Pampa province, where other immigrant communities of non-Mennonite origin exist nowadays[2,4]. Historical records indicate that pioneers of the Argentinean Mennonite community came from Chostitza and Central Europe, pointing to the Netherlands as the core of the original Mennonite diaspora[3,8]
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