Research article
Phylogeography of French male lineages

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fsigss.2009.09.026Get rights and content

Abstract

The genetic landscape of European Y-chromosomes has been widely surveyed. However, French male lineages are still poorly characterized, being scarce the current genetic contribution to the demographic history of France.

We have studied, at Y-chromosome level, French population from 7 different regions throughout France: Nord-Pas-de-Calais (Lille), Bretagne (Rennes), Alsace (Strasbourg), Île-de-France (Paris), Auvergne (Clermont-Ferrand), Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (Marseille) and Midi-Pyrénées (Toulouse).

More than five hundred male samples were genotyped for 27 Y-chromosome biallelic markers and 17 Y-STRs, in order to assess the degree of population sub-structuring of male lineages on this population.

The results obtained show a significant level of population sub-structuring when Bretagne was compared with the remaining regions grouping together as a single cluster, obtaining a value of 6.83% (p = 0.0000) for the proportion of the total variance explained by differences between populations, when using Y-SNPs data.

Our data will contribute to elucidate the genetic composition of France as well as to reconstruct the demographic history of European populations. Likewise, the population sub-structuring detected entails that special care must be taken when Y-chromosome databases of France are used for forensic casework.

Introduction

France, a country situated in the south-west of Europe, has been influenced by the different human migrations that wide-crossed Europe all over the time. Prehistoric and Neolithic population movements could have influenced the genetic diversity of this country. Consequently, those events could have generated some level of geographic sub-structuring of the current male lineages in the region, which is an extremely important consideration in forensic investigation.

On the other hand, while lots of regions in Europe have been analyzed in detail for Y-chromosome polymorphisms, even at a microgeographical level [1], [2], [3], [4], there is currently a lack of data from France.

Hence, the knowledge of the male genetic background of this country could help us to detect the existence of population structure, which is essential to constitute suitable genetic databases to use in forensic casework. Moreover, this study will supply data which could be employed to solve important questions about the demographic human shifts happened during the shaping of European populations.

According to which was explained above, a study of the distribution of Y-chromosome lineages in France was carried out including fast and slow evolving Y-polymorphisms, to detect any existing population structure in that country. We have collected a total of 555 samples of male unrelated individuals from 7 different regions of French geography, specifically: Nord-Pas-de-Calais (Lille), Bretagne (Rennes), Alsace (Strasbourg), Île-de-France (Paris), Auvergne (Clermont-Ferrand), Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (Marseille) and Midi-Pyrénées (Toulouse).

Section snippets

Materials and methods

Sample collection was performed drawing blood of unrelated male individuals with French surname after informed consent. DNA was extracted with QIAamp® DNA Blood Mini Kit (Qiagen) following manufacturer's recommendations.

SNP genotyping was carried out using a set of 27 SNPs, so 22 of them were analyzed into 3 multiplexes according to Brión et al. [5], and a new multiplex was designed to amplify 5 extra SNPs belonging to R1b1b2 haplogroup, in order to determine the most frequent haplogroups in

Results and discussion

A phylogenetic tree composed by 27 binary markers was constructed. 22 different haplogroups were found among the 28 possible ones in the whole sample.

R1b1b2*(xR1b1b2d,e,g,h) was the most frequent haplogroup in all the regions except for Alsace, where the most common one was R1b1b2h. Haplogroups BD and P*(xR1) were only detected in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, and haplogroups N1c and R1b1b2e in Île-de-France and Midi-Pyrénées region, respectively.

We assessed the level of population

Conflict of interest

All the authors declared no conflict of interest.

Role of the funding source

None.

Acknowledgements

E.R.L. was supported by a grant from Programa de Formación del Profesorado Universitario from Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación. P.S.D. is supported by the Isidro Parga Pondal program (Plan Galego de Investigación, Desenvolvemento e Innovación Tecnolóxica-INCITE (2006-2010) from Xunta de Galicia). This work was supported by the grant from the Xunta de Galicia (PGIDIT06PXIB208204PR).

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