Autosomal microsatellite variability of the Arrernte people of Australia

Abstract

The genomic diversity of the Arrernte people of Australia or caterpillar people was investigated utilizing 13 autosomal short tandem repeat (STR) markers. Significant departures from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium were detected at the D18S51, TPOX and CSF1PO loci, which persisted after applying the Bonferroni correction. Gene diversity values oscillate between 0.6302 (CSF1PO) and 0.8731 (D21S11). Observed heterozygosity (Ho) ranges from 0.2632 (D18S51) to 0.8333 (vWA) and is lower than the expected heterozygosity (He) for 12 of the 13 loci analyzed. The genetic relationships of the Arrernte with Middle Eastern, East Asian, South Asian and Indian populations were analyzed by distance-based methods, including Neighbor-Joining trees and nonmetric multidimensional scaling. In addition, the genetic contribution of the populations included in the analysis to the Arrernte gene pool was estimated utilizing weighted least square coefficients. Although the Arrernte population exhibits a remarkable level of genetic differentiation, results of the phylogeographic analyses based on autosomal microsatellite data suggest a certain degree of genetic relatedness between the Arrernte tribe of Australia and populations from the Indian subcontinent. In contrast, the STR diversity analyses failed to detect substantial East Asian contribution to the genetic background of the Arrernte group.

The Soliga, an isolated tribe from Southern India: genetic diversity and phylogenetic affinities

“…Northeast Asia contributes nothing to the gene pool of the two aboriginal Australian populations. These results parallel an earlier study 31 that failed to detect any substantial East Asian contribution to the gene pool of the Arrernte tribe of central Australia while detecting a 56.4% Indian influence and a 25.2% Arab contribution via admixture analysis. The genetic affinity of the two aboriginal Australian populations to Southwest Asia is also reflected in the CA (Figure 2), with the two aboriginal Australian collections plotting relatively close to the Southwest Asian cluster.…”

“…12,29,30 However, a more recent study using autosomal short tandem repeats (STRs) observed significant affinity between the Arrernte people of Australia and populations from the Indian subcontinent. 31 Thus, it is evident that the available data does not provide a clear picture of when and how many times modern humans ventured into Australia via India.…”

Genetic variability in autochthonous Basques from Guipuzcoa: a view from MHC microsatellites

“…Similar results concerning the marked genetic differentiation of autochthonous Basques within the European context (including Iberia) have been obtained from the analysis of autosomal STRs (Pérez‐Miranda et al. , 2005) and the mitochondrial DNA D‐loop region (Alfonso‐Sánchez et al. , 2008a,b).…”