Abstract
The genetic markers on mitochondria DNA (mtDNA) and Y-chromosome can be applied as a powerful tool in population genetics. We present a study to reveal the genetic background of Kyrgyz group, a Chinese ethnic group living in northwest China, and genetic polymorphisms of 60 loci on maternal inherited mtDNA and 24 loci on paternal inherited Y-chromosome short tandem repeats (Y-STRs) were investigated. The relationship between the two systems was tested, and the result indicated that they were statistically independent from each other. The genetic distances between Kyrgyz group and 11 reference populations for mtDNA, and 13 reference populations for Y-STRs were also calculated, respectively. The present results demonstrated that the Kyrgyz group was genetically closer to East Asian populations than European populations based on the mtDNA loci but the other way around for the Y-STRs. The genetic analyses could largely strengthen the understanding for the genetic background of the Kyrgyz group.
Highlights
As one of the populous countries in the world, China consists of 56 official ethnic groups, some of them, including the Uygur, Kazak, Uzbek, and Kyrgyz groups, live in northwest China [1]
Nm (Nm = 138) samples were detected by the mitochondria DNA (mtDNA) marker system, Ny (Ny = 241) male samples were detected by the Y-chromosome short tandem repeats (Y-short tandem repeat (STR)) marker system, and Nj (Nj = 88) samples were detected by both of the two marker systems
We found that the results of the genetic relationships of the Kyrgyz group and reference populations were not completely equivalent between maternal and paternal inheritances
Summary
As one of the populous countries in the world, China consists of 56 official ethnic groups, some of them, including the Uygur, Kazak, Uzbek, and Kyrgyz groups, live in northwest China [1]. On the basis of molecular genetic markers on human autosomes [2,3,4,5,6], the previous studies indicated that these ethnic groups had ancestral components of East Asian and European populations. There are more than 186,000 Kyrgyz individuals (https://guides.lib.unc.edu/china_ethnic/statistics) in China. Based on two types of autosomal markers, insertion/deletion (InDel) [3] and short tandem repeat (STR) loci [4], our previous studies revealed that the Kyrgyz group was genetically closer to other ethnic groups in northwest China. The current research was conducted on the Kyrgyz group using genetic markers of maternal inherited mitochondria DNA (mtDNA) and paternal inherited Y-chromosome STRs (Y-STRs) in order to reveal the genetic relationships between Kyrgyz group and different reference populations from the maternal and paternal perspective [7,8].
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