Population Genetics of the European Roma-A Review

Abstract

The Roma are a group of populations with a common origin that share the Romani identity and cultural heritage. Their genetic history has been inferred through multiple studies based on uniparental and autosomal markers, and current genomic data have provided novel insights into their genetic background. This review was prompted by two factors: (i) new developments to estimate the genetic structure of the Roma at a fine-scale resolution have precisely identified the ancestral components and traced migrations that were previously documented only in historical sources, clarifying and solving debates on the origins and the diaspora of the Roma; (ii) while there has been an effort to review the health determinants of the Roma, the increasing literature on their population genetics has not been subjected to a dedicated review in the last two decades. We believe that a summary on the state of the art will benefit both the public and scholars that are approaching the subject.

Keywords: Romani; bottleneck; founder event; genetic structure; genomics; population genetics.

Figure 1

Early routes of the Romani diaspora. The figure is based on data from Kenrick 2007, Mendizabal et al., 2012, Moorjani et al., 2013, Font-Porterias et al., 2019 and Bianco et al., 2020, and reports the estimated date of arrival and settlement of the Romani populations in different regions of West Eurasia. The wheel symbols indicate the two main reported bottlenecks experienced by the Roma, the arrows indicate the main flow of the migrations and the dotted lines indicate the possible routes of the diaspora.

Figure 2

South Asian and West Eurasian ancestry components in Romani groups based on the results from Font-Porterias et al., 2019. The weighted means for the individuals obtained in the original analysis by genetic clusters are regrouped by country of origin. For sake of clarity, only West Eurasian ancestry percentages are shown.