Paleo-Balkan and Slavic Contributions to the Genetic Pool of Moldavians

Moldova has a rich historical and cultural heritage, which may be reflected in the current genetic makeup of its population. To date, no comprehensive studies exist about the population genetic structure of modern Moldavians. To bridge this gap with respect to paternal lineages, we analyzed 37 binary and 17 multiallelic (STRs) polymorphisms on the non-recombining portion of the Y chromosome in 125 Moldavian males. In addition, 53 Ukrainians from eastern Moldova and 54 Romanians from the neighboring eastern Romania were typed using the same set of markers. In Moldavians, 19 Y chromosome haplogroups were identified, the most common being I-M423 (20.8%), R-M17* (17.6%), R-M458 (12.8%), E-v13 (8.8%), RM269* and R-M412* (both 7.2%). In Romanians, 14 haplogroups were found including I-M423 (40.7%), R-M17* (16.7%), RM405 (7.4%), E-v13 and R-M412* (both 5.6%). In Ukrainians, 13 haplogroups were identified including R-M17 (34.0%), I-M423 (20.8%), R-M269* (9.4%), N-M178, R-M458 and R-M73 (each 5.7%). Our results show that a significant majority of the Moldavian paternal gene pool belongs to eastern/central European and Balkan/eastern Mediterranean Y lineages. Phylogenetic and AMOVA analyses based on Y-STR loci also revealed that Moldavians are close to both eastern/central European and Balkan-Carpathian populations. The data correlate well with historical accounts and geographical location of the region and thus allow to hypothesize that extant Moldavian paternal genetic lineages arose from extensive recent admixture between genetically autochthonous populations of the Balkan-Carpathian zone and neighboring Slavic groups. Citation: Varzari A, Kharkov V, Nikitin AG, Raicu F, Simonova K, et al. (2013) Paleo-Balkan and Slavic Contributions to the Genetic Pool of Moldavians: Insights from the Y Chromosome. PLoS ONE 8(1): e53731. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0053731 Editor: Manfred Kayser, Erasmus University Medical Center, The Netherlands Received August 30, 2012; Accepted December 4, 2012; Published January 16, 2013 Copyright: 2013 Varzari et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This work was supported by the Russian Ministry of Science and Education (contracts # 16.512.11.2033, 11.519.11.2036 and P321). AV was supported by a DAAD fellowship. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. No additional external funding was received for this study. Competing Interests: Dr. Vadim Stepanov is an employee of a commercial company ‘‘Genomnay Diagnostika Ltd.’’ However, this does not alter the authors’ adherence to all the PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials. * E-mail: [email protected]