Reconstructing Roma history from genome-wide data
Abstract
The Roma people, living throughout Europe, are a diverse population linked by the Romani language and culture. Previous linguistic and genetic studies have suggested that the Roma migrated into Europe from South Asia about 1000-1500 years ago. Genetic inferences about Roma history have mostly focused on the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA. To explore what additional information can be learned from genome-wide data, we analyzed data from six Roma groups that we genotyped at hundreds of thousands of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). We estimate that the Roma harbor about 80% West Eurasian ancestry-deriving from a combination of European and South Asian sources- and that the date of admixture of South Asian and European ancestry was about 850 years ago. We provide evidence for Eastern Europe being a major source of European ancestry, and North-west India being a major source of the South Asian ancestry in the Roma. By computing allele sharing as a measure of linkage disequilibrium, we estimate that the migration of Roma out of the Indian subcontinent was accompanied by a severe founder event, which we hypothesize was followed by a major demographic expansion once the population arrived in Europe.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1212.1696,
title = {Reconstructing Roma history from genome-wide data},
author = {Priya Moorjani and Nick Patterson and Po-Ru Loh and Mark Lipson and Péter Kisfali and Bela I Melegh and Michael Bonin and Ľudevít Kádaši and Olaf Rieß and Bonnie Berger and David Reich and Béla Melegh},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1212.1696},
year = {2015}
}