The genetics of Mexico recapitulates Native American substructure and affects biomedical traits
Mexico, hosted many cultures such as the Olmec, the Toltec, the Maya and the Aztec, conquered and colonized by the Spanish Empire in 1521. The country harbors a large source of pre-Columbian diversity and their genetic contributions to today’s population. In a recent paper, Moreno-Estrada et al. 2014 performed a detailed genetic study of Mexican genetic diversity. The results showed the genetic stratification among indigenous populations and an association between subcontinental ancestry and lung function. In the first part of the study, to estimate the genetic diversity, researchers examined autosomal single-nucleotide polymorphisms for more than 500 Native Mexican individuals from all around Mexico. Statistical analysis of genomic data showed that some populations within Mexico are more differentiated than European and East Asian populations. This extreme differentiation thought to be a result of isolation followed by a bottleneck and small effective population sizes. The data was analyzed in various ways (ROH and IBD analysis, PCA etc.) and revealed the population substructure of Mexico. In all of the analysis, the results confirmed that Seri (northernmost) and Lacandon (southernmost) have the highest level of differentiation. Also, the differentiation between Seri and Lacandon was greater than average differentiation between human populations. The relationships between …
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