Cultural variation impacts paternal and maternal genetic lineages of the Hmong-Mien and Sino-Tibetan groups from Thailand

Abstract

The Hmong-Mien (HM) and Sino-Tibetan (ST) speaking groups are known as hill tribes in Thailand; they were the subject of the first studies to show an impact of patrilocality vs. matrilocality on patterns of mitochondrial (mt) DNA vs. male-specific portion of the Y chromosome (MSY) variation. However, HM and ST groups have not been studied in as much detail; here we report and analyze 234 partial MSY sequences (∼2.3 mB) and 416 complete mtDNA sequences from 14 populations that, when combined with our previous published data, provides the largest dataset yet for the hill tribes. We find a striking difference between Hmong and IuMien (Mien-speaking) groups: the Hmong are genetically different from both the IuMien and all other Thai groups, whereas the IuMien are genetically more similar to other linguistic groups than to the Hmong. In general, we find less of an impact of patrilocality vs. matrilocality on patterns of mtDNA vs. MSY variation than previous studies. However, there is a dramatic difference in the frequency of MSY and mtDNA lineages of Northeast Asian (NEA) origin vs. Southeast Asian (SEA) origin in HM vs. ST groups: HM groups have high frequencies of NEA MSY lineages but lower frequencies of NEA mtDNA lineages, while ST groups show the opposite. A potential explanation is that the ancestors of Thai HM groups were patrilocal, while the ancestors of Thai ST groups were matrilocal. Overall, these results attest to the impact of cultural practices on patterns of mtDNA vs. MSY variation.

Malaria resistance-related biological adaptation and complex evolutionary footprints of Tai-Kadai people inferred from 796 genomes

“…FADS-rs174570 had the top selection signal (PBS=0.2533). Previous genetic studies have reported that FADS levels were associated with Lipid Metabolism Disorder and Hypobetalipoproteinemia (31) (32). Ancient Southern Chinese people experienced a long history of infectious diseases.…”

“…One of the typical representatives was Hainan Li, which had a relatively isolated genetic background and complex evolutionary history (13,37). Therefore, the genetic origin and phylogenetic relationship within TK-speaking populations remained to be further characterized (32,(40)(41)(42). We collected and genotyped 24 Bouyei individuals from Guizhou Bannong and merged newly-generated data with previously published data to produce three datasets: low-density merged HO dataset (26,27); middle-density merged 1240K dataset, and high-density merged WGS dataset (43)(44)(45)(46)(47)(48)(49) to provide new insights into the demographic history, population structure and human genetic diversity of TK-speaking.…”

“…We merged our genotyped Bouyei data with publicly available and previously published 38 TK-speaking populations from Southern China and SEA datasets, forming the primary TK datasets to explore the population structure and genetic relationship of whole TK-speaking populations (3,32,39,47,56). The TK datasets included 796 individuals from 38 populations, 522 from Southern China and 274 from SEA.…”