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Reconstruction of Y-chromosome phylogeny reveals two neolithic expansions of Tibeto-Burman populations

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Abstract

Diffusion of Tibeto-Burman populations across the Tibetan Plateau led to the largest human community in a high-altitude environment and has long been a focus of research on high-altitude adaptation, archeology, genetics, and linguistics. However, much uncertainty remains regarding the origin, diversification, and expansion of Tibeto-Burman populations. In this study, we analyzed a 7.0M bp region of 285 Y-chromosome sequences, including 81 newly reported ones, from male samples from Tibeto-Burman populations and other related Eastern Asian populations. We identified several paternal lineages specific to Tibeto-Burman populations, and most of these lineages emerged between 6000 and 2500 years ago. A phylogenetic tree and lineage dating both support the hypothesis that the establishment of Tibeto-Burman ancestral groups was triggered by Neolithic expansions from the middle Yellow River Basin and admixtures with local populations on the Tibetan Plateau who survived the Paleolithic Age. Furthermore, according to the geographical distributions of the haplogroups, we propose that there are two Neolithic expansion origins for all modern Tibeto-Burman populations. Our research provides a clear scenario about the sources, admixture process and later diffusion process of the ancestor population of all Tibeto-Burman populations.

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Acknowledgements

We thank all donors for providing DNA samples. This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (91731303 to S.X. and H.L., 31222030 and 31671297 to H.L., 31401060 to Y.S., 31271338 to L.J., 31501011 to Y.L., 31525014‚ 31771388‚  and 31711530221 to S.X.), MOE Scientific Research Project (113022A to H.L.), Shanghai Shuguang Project (14SG05 to H.L.), Ministry of Science and Technology of China (MOST) (2016YFC0900300 to H.L.). S.X. also acknowledges financial support from the Strategic Priority Research Program (XDB13040100) and Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences (QYZDJ-SSW-SYS009) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the Program of Shanghai Academic Research Leader (16XD1404700), Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Major Project (2017SHZDZX01)‚ and the National Key Research and Development Program (2016YFC0906403). L.H.W. was supported by Future Scientists Project of China Scholarship Council. C.C.W was supported by the Nanqiang Outstanding Young Talents Program of Xiamen University. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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Authors

Contributions

LXW, YL, CZ, and LHW carried out the molecular genetic studies and drafted the manuscript. YL, CZ, SHX, SY, and SM collected the samples. YL, CZ, and SY participated in the experiments. YZH, CCW, SQW, SM, and LJ participated in the statistical analysis. SHX and HL designed the study and revised the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Shu-Hua Xu or Hui Li.

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The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Research involving human participants and/or animals

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Additional information

Communicated by S. Hohmann.

Electronic supplementary material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Supplementary material 1 Figure S1. Detailed phylogenetic tree of all studied samples (TIF 435 KB)

Supplementary material 2 Table S1. Detailed information of studied samples (XLSX 61 KB)

438_2018_1461_MOESM3_ESM.xlsx

Supplementary material 3 Table S2. Age and posterior support estimates for each numbered clade on the phylogenetic tree in Figure S1 (XLSX 41 KB)

Supplementary material 4 Supplementary Text (DOCX 111 KB)

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Wang, LX., Lu, Y., Zhang, C. et al. Reconstruction of Y-chromosome phylogeny reveals two neolithic expansions of Tibeto-Burman populations. Mol Genet Genomics 293, 1293–1300 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00438-018-1461-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00438-018-1461-2

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