Unravelling the hidden ancestry of American admixed populations

Nat Commun. 2015 Mar 24:6:6596. doi: 10.1038/ncomms7596.

Abstract

The movement of people into the Americas has brought different populations into contact, and contemporary American genomes are the product of a range of complex admixture events. Here we apply a haplotype-based ancestry identification approach to a large set of genome-wide SNP data from a variety of American, European and African populations to determine the contributions of different ancestral populations to the Americas. Our results provide a fine-scale characterization of the source populations, identify a series of novel, previously unreported contributions from Africa and Europe and highlight geohistorical structure in the ancestry of American admixed populations.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • American Indian or Alaska Native / genetics*
  • Asian People / genetics*
  • Black People / genetics*
  • Central America
  • Databases, Genetic
  • Emigration and Immigration*
  • Genetics, Population
  • Genome, Human / genetics*
  • Human Migration
  • Humans
  • North America
  • Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide
  • South America
  • White People / genetics*