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Archiver > GENEALOGY-DNA > 2002-09 > 1031150040
From:
Subject: Re: [DNA] African Y Markers?
Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2002 10:34:00 EDT
In a message dated 09/02/02 4:15:55 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
writes:
> A friend of mine said that she was told that if the results of a Y
> Chromosome test were DYS # 390 =Alleles 20 or 21 combined with Dys #19
> =Alleles 14 or 15, then that is a African signature. I know so little about
> this and searching on the Internet is not helping much. Could someone
> comment on this? Thanks!
PubMed would be a good place to search for papers on the topic. Key words
could be Y chromosome Africa. You would expect to find a lot of diversity
within Africa, because it is such a large continent and mutations have been
accumulating there for the longest period of time.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed
Nancy Custer has compiled frequency graphs for the US Y STR database, which
includes ~600 African Americans. This is a fairly small sample size, and of
course African Americans don't represent the entire continent of Africa, but
they may be the relevant population for your friend
http://www.contexo.info/
Nancy's graphs are for one locus at a time. You can query the Y STR database
for any combination of loci and alleles.
http://www.ystr.org/us
For your example, I plugged in numbers for DYS390 and 19. The results for
African American, European American, and Hispanic American are
20,14____6___0___0
20,15____5___0___0
21,14____6___2___2
21,15__160___3__18
So it looks like 21,15 is indeed associated with African American heritage,
but the other combinations of alleles are so rare that they probably would
not show a statistically significant association.
Ann Turner
GENEALOGY-DNA List Administrator
http://lists.rootsweb.com/index/other/Miscellaneous/GENEALOGY-DNA.html
DNA preservation kits: http://www.dnafiler.com
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