Unique Genetic Structure of Y-chromosomal Lineage of the Moken from the Andaman Sea of Thailand

Abstract

To investigate the genetic structure of the Y-chromosome of the Moken people living in the Andaman Sea area of Thailand, and to compare the genetic relationship between them and other groups on the mainland, as well as the islands Southeast Asia. This study analyzed 17 Y-chromosomal short tandem repeat (Y-STR) loci in 11 unrelated Moken males from Ranong Province of Thailand. The genomic DNA was extracted from buccal cells, and amplified using an AmpFℓSTR Yfiler PCR Amplification Kit. We compared Y-STR genotypes with other populations from the Y Chromosome Haplotype Reference Database (YHRD) and constructed the multidimensional scaling (MDS) plot and the neighbor-joining tree (NJ), based on genetic distance Rst. Nine different haplotypes from 11 unrelated individuals were identified. The haplotype diversity was 0.9455 ± 0.066, which was closer to other Southeast Asian populations. The genetic relationship results also showed the genetic differentiation of the Moken, without any significant differences among them, as well as some Austronesian (AN) groups from Malaysia and Sino-Tibetan (ST) groups from Taiwan. This study suggests that there was a unique genetic structure on the Y-chromosome of the Moken from the Andaman Sea, showing genetic relations with some AN and ST groups.

South Asian maternal and paternal lineages in southern Thailand and the role of sex-biased admixture

“…Previous MSY and mtDNA studies reported the presence of haplogroups frequent in SA in some Thai populations, e.g., mtDNA haplogroups W3a1b, M30 and M45 in central Thais and Mon [ 26 , 27 ] and MSY haplogroups R1a1 in Khmer, J2a in Nyahkur and J and R in Mon [ 23 ]. However, the role of sex-biased admixture related to SA ancestry in MSEA has not been studied, and moreover only a few groups from Southern Thailand have been investigated for mtDNA and MSY variation [ 5 , 28 , 29 ]. Here, we generated new data, consisting of complete mtDNA genome sequences from TK- and AN-speaking southern Thai populations, and ∼2.3 mB of MSY sequences from the southern Thai_TK.…”