Genetic ancestry of a Moroccan population as inferred from autosomal STRs

Abstract

Detecting population substructure and ancestry is a critical issue for both association studies of health behaviors and forensic genetics. Determining aspects of a population's genetic history as potential sources of substructure can aid in design of future genetic studies. Within this context, fifteen autosomal short tandem repeat (STR), were used to examine population genetic structure and hypotheses of the origin of the modern Moroccan population from individuals belonging to three different ethnical groups from Morocco (Arab, Berber and Sahrawi), by comparing their autosomal STR variation with that of neighboring and non-neighboring populations in North Africa, Europe and Middle East as well as proposed ancestral populations in Morocco (Berber). We report on the results that the gradient of North African ancestry accounts for previous observations of low levels of sharing with Near East and a substantially increased gene flow especially from Morocco and Spain.

Genetic polymorphism study at 15 autosomal locus in central Indian population

“…This finding is found consistent with the clustering pattern of observed in the NJ tree and PCA plot. We also compared central Indian population on the basis of locus wise allele frequencies at all the 15 loci with the other published populations from Palestinian_Iraq (AL-Zubaidi et al 2014 ), Swedish (Montelius et al 2008 ), Hungarian (Demeter et al 2010 ), Shenyang_China (Hou et al 2013 ), Guangdong (Zhu et al 2005 ), Moroccan (Bentayebi et al 2014 ), Tamil (Balamurugan et al 2010 ), Croatian (Projić et al 2007 ), Wallachia_ Romania (Stanciu et al 2009 ), Estonia (Sadam et al 2014 ) and Latvia (Jemeljanova et al 2015 ) populations using Pairwise Fst distance ranging from −0.001 to 0.266 (Table 9 , 10 ). Central Indian population showed genetic detachment from all other area specific published population data (Table 2 ), used for comparison and also showed significant variation at all 15 loci with Wallachia population.…”

Population data for 21 autosomal short tandem repeat markers in the Arabic population of the United Arab Emirates

“…The calculated allele frequencies and genetic parameters for the 21 autosomal STR markers were presented (Supplementary Table 2). The STR marker with the largest range for the PE can be expected as these values do vary across individual cases [13]. The combined power of exclusion indicates that there is a higher fraction of the individuals with allele variations, highlighting genetic diversity of UAE individuals.…”

“…These high informative values support the heterozygosity values indicating the high degree of genetic polymorphism. Each marker had a typical PI value larger than 1.0, which is indicative of relativeness and usefulness for paternity testing applications [13].…”

Analysis of 17 STR data on 5362 southern Portuguese individuals—an update on reference database

“…[2]. The populations compared in this study were the northern Portuguese [3] and central Portuguese [4] and also the 2006 southern Portuguese, [1] alongside those from Spain [5], Italy [6], Greece [7], Romania [8], Morocco [9], Angola [10] and Korea [11]. With Arlequin's results a phylogram was constructed using Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis v.6.06 software [12] values of zero indicate deviations from HWE, these occur because we are not dealing with perfect populations subject to Hardy-Weinberg principles.…”