Forensic and phylogeographic characterisation of mtDNA lineages from Somalia

Abstract

The African mitochondrial (mt) phylogeny is coarsely resolved but the majority of population data generated so far is limited to the analysis of the first hypervariable segment (HVS-1) of the control region (CR). Therefore, this study aimed on the investigation of the entire CR of 190 unrelated Somali individuals to enrich the severely underrepresented African mtDNA pool. The majority (60.5 %) of the haplotypes were of sub-Saharan origin with L0a1d, L2a1h and L3f being the most frequently observed haplogroups. This is in sharp contrast to previous data reported from the Y-chromosome, where only about 5 % of the observed haplogroups were of sub-Saharan provenance. We compared the genetic distances based on population pairwise F (st) values between 11 published East, Central and North African as well as western Asian populations and the Somali sequences and displayed them in a multi-dimensional scaling plot. Genetic proximity evidenced by clustering roughly reflected the relative geographic location of the populations. The sequences will be included in the EMPOP database ( www.empop.org ) under accession number EMP00397 upon publication (Parson and Dür Forensic Sci Int Genet 1:88-92, 2007).

Genetic portrait of Lisboa immigrant population from Cabo Verde with mitochondrial DNA analysis

“…The majority of the mtDNA haplotypes (92.24%) are included in macrohaplogroup L. Haplogroup L2a1a is the most frequent haplogroup found in the present study (12.621%). Phylogram representing F st distances between the Cabo Verde population of Lisbon and selected populations from the literature (Fendt et al 2012a, b;Mikkelsen et al 2012) are shown in figure 1.…”

“…These populations also share the most common haplogroups. Somalia, a country in the east African coast, has as most common haplogroups L0a1d, L2a1h and L3f, characteristic of east and southeast Africa, and M1 and N1, characteristic of northeast Africa and Middle East (Mikkelsen et al 2012). Analysis of the entire mtDNA control region for the first time in Cabo Verde native individuals increased the discriminatory power between samples and overall efficiency in the determination of haplogroups.…”

Determination of population origin: a comparison of autosomal SNPs, Y-chromosomal and mtDNA haplogroups using a Malagasy population as example

“…The latter is also true for Asian-Indonesian haplogroups M7c3c, M32, E1a1a or F3b1. A comparison of the mtDNA haplogroup distribution in Madagascar with Asian or African populations [23][24][25][26][27][28] underlined the special position of the Malagasy (Supplementary Figure S3) who cluster with none of the other populations.…”

Genetic portrait of Lisboa immigrant population from Angola with mitochondrial DNA

“…The high frequency of haplogroups L shown in African populations, as well as the high level of heterogeneity of the mitochondrial DNA sequences in this continent have been reported several times, being higher than in other geographical regions [26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40].…”

“…Studies regarding mtDNA total control region of African populations have been performed [31][32][33]37]. However, sequences of mtDNA total control region of Angolan individuals are not published.…”