- S. Shringarpure, E. Xing. 2010. Genetic Population Structure in Pacific Islanders. Abstract: Analyzing genetic population structure is useful in gaining insight about the evolutionary history of human populations. It gives us an understanding of the genetic similarities and differences between different populations and helps study their isolation, migration and inter-mixing. With modern genotype sequencing methods, new data sets about human population are becoming available. The Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) includes population samples from 52 worldwide populations genotyped at hundreds of polymorphic loci. However, the sampling of populations from across the world was not uniform, with some geographical regions such as the Indian subcontinent, the Americas and the Pacific islands severely under-sampled. Newer data sets have focused on genotyping samples from populations which were insufficiently sampled previously. The Pacific Islanders are of interest anthropologically due to their cultural diversity and evolutionarily due to their geographical location. In this work, we analyze the genetic population structure in the Pacific islander populations using mStruct , a methodology based on mixedmembership models that we developed previously. We present results of the population structure analyses and our hypotheses about how the populations have evolved from ancient populations. Our results show that there is a large amount of genetic diversity present in the Pacific islanders, and that it varies across the various islands of the Pacific, largely determined by geography. There is also some variation in genetic profiles that correlates with local languages.
