Characterizing the genetic differences between two distinct migrant groups from Indo-European and Dravidian speaking populations in India

BMC Genetics

Research Article

Chiea-Chuen Khor¹  Mohammad Ali²  Yik-Ying Teo³  Esakimuthu Nisha Pillai⁴  Rick Twee-Hee Ong⁴  Peng Chen⁴  Xuanyao Liu⁵ 

[1] Genome Institute of Singapore, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore, Singapore;Life Sciences Institute, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore;Life Sciences Institute, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore;Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore;NUS Graduate School for Integrative Science and Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore;Genome Institute of Singapore, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore, Singapore;Department of Statistics and Applied Probability, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore;Department of Statistics and Applied Probability, Faculty of Science, National University of Singapore, Blk S16, Level 7, 6 Science Drive 2, 117546, Singapore, Singapore;Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore;Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore;NUS Graduate School for Integrative Science and Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore;

关键词: Positive selection;    Long haplotype;    Population diversity;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2156-15-86

 received in 2013-11-15, accepted in 2014-07-11,  发布年份 2014

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundIndia is home to many ethnically and linguistically diverse populations. It is hypothesized that history of invasions by people from Persia and Central Asia, who are referred as Aryans in Hindu Holy Scriptures, had a defining role in shaping the Indian population canvas. A shift in spoken languages from Dravidian languages to Indo-European languages around 1500 B.C. is central to the Aryan Invasion Theory. Here we investigate the genetic differences between two sub-populations of India consisting of: (1) The Indo-European language speaking Gujarati Indians with genome-wide data from the International HapMap Project; and (2) the Dravidian language speaking Tamil Indians with genome-wide data from the Singapore Genome Variation Project.ResultsWe implemented three population genetics measures to identify genomic regions that are significantly differentiated between the two Indian populations originating from the north and south of India. These measures singled out genomic regions with: (i) SNPs exhibiting significant variation in allele frequencies in the two Indian populations; and (ii) differential signals of positive natural selection as quantified by the integrated haplotype score (iHS) and cross-population extended haplotype homozygosity (XP-EHH). One of the regions that emerged spans the SLC24A5 gene that has been functionally shown to affect skin pigmentation, with a higher degree of genetic sharing between Gujarati Indians and Europeans.ConclusionsOur finding points to a gene-flow from Europe to north India that provides an explanation for the lighter skin tones present in North Indians in comparison to South Indians.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Ali et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014. 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 credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.