Demand for larger Y-STR reference databases in ethnic melting-pot countries: Argentina as a test case

CAPUTO, MARIELA; SALA, A.; CORACH, D.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF LEGAL MEDICINE.

SPRINGER

Año: 2019 vol. 133 p. 1309 - 1320

0937-9827

The Y chromosome behaves as a single locus. Its genetic information is useful in forensic casework, deficiency kinship testing,and population genetics studies. Continuous increases of loci number within commercial kits forced modification of worldwidereference databases. In Pan American countries, like Argentina, diverse parental ethnic groups contributed to the extant admixedurban populations. We report 509 additional haplotypes of 23 Y-STRs from donors inhabiting urban areas of six Argentineanprovinces: Buenos Aires, Santiago del Estero, Santa Cruz, Rio Negro, Santa Fe, and Formosa. To better understand the demographiclandscape of the admixed urban paternal lineages, structural analysis was performed using published data from otherArgentinean provinces. AMOVA by Rst distance and inferred haplogroups by two predictive online software methods based onhaplotypes yielded complementary results with respect to detected population structure, probably due to the different proportionsof the Native American Q3-M3 haplogroup in the studied samples. This situation, which is common to most North, Meso, andSouth American countries, underscores the need for the additional step of typing specific SNPs for haplogroup diagnosis. Wepropose organizing Y-STR haplotype reference databases according to the most frequent haplogroups detected in a givenadmixed population