Abstract
Sui people, which belong to the Tai-Kadai-speaking family, remain poorly characterized due to a lack of genome-wide data. To infer the fine-scale population genetic structure and putative genetic sources of the Sui people, we genotyped 498,655 genome-wide single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) using SNP arrays in 68 Sui individuals from seven indigenous populations in Guizhou province and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in Southwest China and co-analyzed with available East Asians via a series of population genetic methods including principal component analysis (PCA), ADMIXTURE, pairwise Fst genetic distance, f-statistics, qpWave, and qpAdm. Our results revealed that Guangxi and Guizhou Sui people showed a strong genetic affinity with populations from southern China and Southeast Asia, especially Tai-Kadai- and Hmong-Mien-speaking populations as well as ancient Iron Age Taiwan Hanben, Gongguan individuals supporting the hypothesis that Sui people came from southern China originally. The indigenous Tai-Kadai-related ancestry (represented by Li), Northern East Asian-related ancestry, and Hmong-Mien-related lineage contributed to the formation processes of the Sui people. We identified the genetic substructure within Sui groups: Guizhou Sui people were relatively homogeneous and possessed similar genetic profiles with neighboring Tai-Kadai-related populations, such as Maonan. While Sui people in Yizhou and Huanjiang of Guangxi might receive unique, additional gene flow from Hmong-Mien-speaking populations and Northern East Asians, respectively, after the divergence within other Sui populations. Sui people could be modeled as the admixture of ancient Yellow River Basin farmer-related ancestry (36.2–54.7%) and ancient coastal Southeast Asian-related ancestry (45.3–63.8%). We also identified the potential positive selection signals related to the disease susceptibility in Sui people via integrated haplotype score (iHS) and number of segregating sites by length (nSL) scores. These genomic findings provided new insights into the demographic history of Tai-Kadai-speaking Sui people and their interaction with neighboring populations in Southern China.
Highlights
Southwest China is home to diverse ethnic minorities and linguistic families
The distributions of the studied Sui people were relatively scattered, with two major clusters: one genetic cline consisting of Huanjiang Sui individuals from Guangxi, which was placed on the Hmong-Mien ancestry (Hmong)-Mien-related cline; and the other comprising the rest of the newly studied Sui groups, clustered together with published Tai-Kadai-speaking populations and displaying closer genetic relationships with AA, AN, and Sinitic-speaking populations from Southern China and Southeast Asia
The strong correlation between the population structure and linguistic classifications/geographic locations in East Asia has been reported in several genome-wide single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)-based studies
Summary
Southwest China is home to diverse ethnic minorities and linguistic families. Previous population genetic studies based on genetic markers including mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y-chromosome haplogroups, short tandem repeats (STR), insertion/deletion polymorphisms (InDels), and genome-wide single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) shed light on the genetic profile and demographic history of ethnolinguistic groups from southern China and Southeast Asia A SNP chip-based population study from the genomic perspective demonstrated that the genetic profile of Tai-Kadai-speaking Hainan Li from southernmost China (referred to as Hlai) was less affected by the Neolithic farming expansion or historical migration compared with other mainland Tai-Kadaispeaking populations; Hlai-related lineage contributed a large proportion of the ancestry to the mainland Tai-Kadai-speaking populations (He et al, 2020). Yang et al (2020) revealed that Neolithic Fujian-related ancestry contributed substantially to the present-day Southern Chinese and Southeast Asians; during the Early Neolithic period, Northern East Asians related to Coastal Shandong-related ancestry migrated southward and shifted the genetic makeup of populations from southern China. Wang T. et al (2021) recently reported that Guangxi Longlin-related ancestry, Fujian Qihe-related ancestry, and deep East Asian Hoabinhian-related ancestry participated in the formation of Early Neolithic Guangxi ancients (represented by Dushan/Baojianshan) but limitedly contributed to presentday Southeast Asians; the historical Guangxi samples possessed
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