The ancient Yakuts: a population genetic enigma

• Published in: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
• Main Authors: Keyser, Christine, Hollard, Clemence, Gonzalez, Angela, Fausser, Jean-Luc, Rivals, Eric, Alexeev, Anatoly Nikolayevich, Riberon, Alexandre, Crubezy, Eric, Ludes, Bertrand
• Other Authors: Anthropologie Moléculaire et Imagerie de Synthèse (AMIS), Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier (UT3), Université Fédérale Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées-Université Fédérale Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Méthodes et Algorithmes pour la Bioinformatique (MAB), Laboratoire d'Informatique de Robotique et de Microélectronique de Montpellier (LIRMM), Université de Montpellier (UM)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Université de Montpellier (UM)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Institut de Biologie Computationnelle (IBC), Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA)-Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria)-Université de Montpellier (UM)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Medical Institute Yakutsk, Evolution et Diversité Biologique (EDB), Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD)-Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier (UT3), Institut de Médecine Légale - IML (Paris, France), - Human Adaptation programme of the French Polar Institute Paul Emile Victor- French Archaeological Missions in Oriental Siberia (Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs, France)- North-Eastern Federal University (Yakutsk, Sakha Republic)
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2015
• Subjects: Yakuts; Short tandem repeats; Ancient DNA; Kinship; geneticsmolecular biology; [INFO.INFO-BI]Computer Science [cs]/Bioinformatics [q-bio.QM]; The ''Y''; Verkhoyansk; Yakutia
• Online Access: https://hal-lirmm.ccsd.cnrs.fr/lirmm-01170676; https://hal-lirmm.ccsd.cnrs.fr/lirmm-01170676/document; https://hal-lirmm.ccsd.cnrs.fr/lirmm-01170676/file/Keyser-etal-PhTRSocB-abstract.pdf; https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0385

International audience This study is part of an ongoing project aiming at determining the ethnogenesis of an eastern Siberian ethnic group, the Yakuts, on the basis of archaeological excavations carried out over a period of 10 years in three regions of Yakutia: Central Yakutia, the Vilyuy River basin and the Verkhoyansk area. In this study, genetic analyses were carried out on skeletal remains from 130 individuals of unknown ancestry dated mainly from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century AD. Kinship studies were conducted using sets of commercially available autosomal and Y-chromosomal short tandem repeats (STRs) along with hypervariable region I sequences of the mitochondrial DNA. An unexpected and intriguing finding of this work was that the uniparental marker systems did not always corroborate results from autosomal DNA analyses; in some cases, false-positive relationships were observed. These discrepancies revealed that 15 autosomal STR loci are not sufficient to discriminate between first degree relatives and more distantly related individuals in our ancient Yakut sample. The Y-STR analyses led to similar conclusions, because the current Y-STR panels provided the limited resolution of the paternal lineages.