Forensic Features and Population Genetic Structure of Dong, Yi, Han, and Chuanqing Human Populations in Southwest China Inferred From Insertion/Deletion Markers

Abstract

Guizhou province in southwest China has abundant genetic and cultural diversities, but the forensic features and genetic structure of Guizhou populations remain poorly understood due to the sparse sampling of present-day populations. Here, we present 30 insertion/deletion polymorphisms (InDels) data of 591 human individuals collected from four populations, Dong, Yi, Han, and Chuanqing residing in Guizhou. We calculated the forensic parameters of 30 InDel loci and found that this panel meets the efficiency of forensic personal identification based on the high combined power of discrimination, but it could only be used as a complementary tool in the parentage testing because of the lower combined probability of exclusion values. The studied populations are genetically closer related to geographically adjacent or linguistically related populations in southern China, such as the Tai-Kadai and Hmong-Mien speaking groups. The unrecognized ethnic Chuanqing people show an additional genetic affinity with Han Chinese, highlighting the role of possible military immigrations in their origin.

Keywords: Chuanqing human population; Dong human population; Guizhou human population; Han human population; Investigator® DIPplex Kit; Yi human population; forensic genetics; population structure.

FIGURE 1

The geographical locations of four newly genotyped populations in this study.

FIGURE 2

Heatmap on the basis of the insertion allele frequency distributions for Guizhou Dong, Yi, Han, and Chuanqing groups and 93 worldwide reference populations.

FIGURE 3

Principal component analysis among Guizhou Dong, Yi, Han, Chuanqing, and 47 reference populations on the basis of allele frequencies of 30 insertion/deletion polymorphisms (InDels).

FIGURE 4

The two-dimensional plot of the first two principal components of principal component analyses among Guizhou Dong, Yi, Han, Chuanqing, and 93 worldwide reference populations based on allele frequencies of 30 insertion/deletion polymorphisms (InDels).

FIGURE 5

Structure analysis for the full-loci dataset with k ranging from 2 to 8 of the 51 populations.

FIGURE 6

Line chart on the basis of the pairwise Fst genetic distances among Guizhou Dong, Yi, Han, Chuanqing, and 47 previously studied populations.

FIGURE 7

Phylogenetic relationship reconstruction by neighbor-joining algorithm among the 51 worldwide populations based on the pairwise Fst genetic distances.

FIGURE 8

Heatmap on the basis of the pairwise Nei’s genetic distances of 30 deletion and insertion polymorphism (DIP) loci among 97 worldwide populations conducted with R Statistical Software.

FIGURE 9

Phylogenetic relationship reconstruction by neighbor-joining algorithm among the 97 worldwide populations based on the pairwise Nei’s genetic distances.