Larger Genetic Differences Within Africans Than Between Africans and Eurasians

The worldwide pattern of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) variation is of great interest to human geneticists, population geneticists, and evolutionists, but remains incompletely understood. We studied the pattern in noncoding regions, because they are less affected by natural selection than are...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Genetics (Austin) 2002-05, Vol.161 (1), p.269-274
Main Authors: Yu, Ning, Chen, Feng-Chi, Ota, Satoshi, Jorde, Lynn B, Pamilo, Pekka, Patthy, Laszlo, Ramsay, Michele, Jenkins, Trefor, Shyue, Song-Kun, Li, Wen-Hsiung
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Africa
African Continental Ancestry Group - genetics
Asia
Asian Continental Ancestry Group - genetics
Biological Evolution
Comparative analysis
Europe
European Continental Ancestry Group - genetics
Evolution, Molecular
Genetic Variation
Genetics
Humans
Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide
Regions
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The worldwide pattern of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) variation is of great interest to human geneticists, population geneticists, and evolutionists, but remains incompletely understood. We studied the pattern in noncoding regions, because they are less affected by natural selection than are coding regions. Thus, it can reflect better the history of human evolution and can serve as a baseline for understanding the maintenance of SNPs in human populations. We sequenced 50 noncoding DNA segments each approximately 500 bp long in 10 Africans, 10 Europeans, and 10 Asians. An analysis of the data suggests that the sampling scheme is adequate for our purpose. The average nucleotide diversity (pi) for the 50 segments is only 0.061% +/- 0.010% among Asians and 0.064% +/- 0.011% among Europeans but almost twice as high (0.115% +/- 0.016%) among Africans. The African diversity estimate is even higher than that between Africans and Eurasians (0.096% +/- 0.012%). From available data for noncoding autosomal regions (total length = 47,038 bp) and X-linked regions (47,421 bp), we estimated the pi-values for autosomal regions to be 0.105, 0.070, 0.069, and 0.097% for Africans, Asians, Europeans, and between Africans and Eurasians, and the corresponding values for X-linked regions to be 0.088, 0.042, 0.053, and 0.082%. Thus, Africans differ from one another slightly more than from Eurasians, and the genetic diversity in Eurasians is largely a subset of that in Africans, supporting the out of Africa model of human evolution. Clearly, one must specify the geographic origins of the individuals sampled when studying pi or SNP density.
ISSN:0016-6731
1943-2631
1943-2631
DOI:10.1093/genetics/161.1.269