Abstract
The Pamirs, among the world’s highest mountains in Central Asia, are one of homelands with the most extreme high altitude for several ethnic groups. The settlement history of modern humans on the Pamirs remains still opaque. Herein, we have sequenced the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genomes of 382 individuals belonging to eight populations from the Pamirs and the surrounding lowlands in Central Asia. We construct the Central Asian (including both highlanders and lowlanders) mtDNA haplogroup tree at the highest resolution. All the matrilineal components are assigned into the defined mtDNA haplogroups in East and West Eurasians. No basal lineages that directly emanate from the Eurasian founder macrohaplogroups M, N, and R are found. Our data support the origin of Central Asian being the result of East–West Eurasian admixture. The coalescence ages for more than 93% mtDNA lineages in Central Asians are dated after the last glacial maximum (LGM). The post-LGM and/or later dispersals/admixtures play dominant roles in shaping the maternal gene pool of Central Asians. More importantly, our analyses reveal the mtDNA heterogeneity in the Pamir highlanders, not only between the Turkic Kyrgyz and the Indo-European Tajik groups, but also among three highland Tajiks. No evidence supports positive selection or relaxation of selective constraints in the mtDNAs of highlanders as compared to that of lowlanders. Our results suggest a complex history for the peopling of Pamirs by multiple waves of migrations from various genetic resources during different time scales.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to all volunteers and samplers. We thank Ni-Ni Shi, Quan-Kuan Shen, Ya-Jiang Wu, Mu-Yang Wang, Yao-Ming Li, and Feng Xu for the technical assistance. This study was supported by grants from National Natural Science Foundation of China (31301026), Science & Technology Department of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (201491188), Research Center for Ecology and Environment of Central Asia, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Bureau of Science and Technology of Yunnan Province. M.-S.P. thanks the support from the Youth Innovation Promotion Association, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
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Min-Sheng Peng, Weifang Xu, Jiao-Jiao Song, and Xing Chen contributed equally to this work.
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Figure S3. Posterior probabilities of scenarios for target populations based on the linear discriminant analysis on summary statistics
41431_2017_28_MOESM5_ESM.pdf
Figure S5. The N/S ratio values of mitochondrial genomes from the Pamir highlanders, the lowlanders, and the general population
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Peng, MS., Xu, W., Song, JJ. et al. Mitochondrial genomes uncover the maternal history of the Pamir populations. Eur J Hum Genet 26, 124–136 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41431-017-0028-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41431-017-0028-8
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