The Mediterranean Sea as a barrier to gene flow: evidence from variation in and around the F7 and F12 genomic regions

BMC Evolutionary Biology

Research Article

Jean-Michel Dugoujon¹  Mark Stoneking²  Esther Esteban³  Pedro Moral³  Georgios Athanasiadis³  Emili González-Pérez³ 

[1] CNRS and University Toulouse III Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France;Department of Evolutionary Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany;Unitat d'Antropologia, Facultat de Biologia, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain;

关键词: Gene Flow;    Ivory Coast;    Genetic Barrier;    Principal Component Analysis Plot;    High Gene Flow;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2148-10-84

 received in 2009-11-16, accepted in 2010-03-27,  发布年份 2010

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThe Mediterranean has a long history of interactions among different peoples. In this study, we investigate the genetic relationships among thirteen population samples from the broader Mediterranean region together with three other groups from the Ivory Coast and Bolivia with a particular focus on the genetic structure between North Africa and South Europe. Analyses were carried out on a diverse set of neutral and functional polymorphisms located in and around the coagulation factor VII and XII genomic regions (F7 and F12).ResultsPrincipal component analysis revealed a significant clustering of the Mediterranean samples into North African and South European groups consistent with the results from the hierarchical AMOVA, which showed a low but significant differentiation between groups from the two shores. For the same range of geographic distances, populations from each side of the Mediterranean were found to differ genetically more than populations within the same side. To further investigate this differentiation, we carried out haplotype analyses, which provided partial evidence that sub-Saharan gene flow was higher towards North Africa than South Europe.ConclusionsAs there is no consensus between the two genomic regions regarding gene flow through the Sahara, it is hard to reach a solid conclusion about its role in the differentiation between the two Mediterranean shores and more data are necessary to reach a definite conclusion. However our data suggest that the Mediterranean Sea was at least partially a barrier to gene flow between the two shores.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Athanasiadis et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2010. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.