Admixture occurs when individuals from parental populations that have been isolated for hundreds of generations form a new hybrid population. Currently, interest in measuring biogeographic ancestry has spread from anthropology to forensic sciences, direct-to-consumers personal genomics, and civil rights issues of minorities, and it is critical for genetic epidemiology studies of admixed populat...

When previously isolated populations meet and mix, the resulting admixed population can benefit from several genetic advantages, including increased genetic variation, the creation of novel genotypes and the masking of deleterious mutations. These admixture benefits are thought to play an important role in biological invasions. In contrast, populations in their native range often remain differe...

Although Siberia was inhabited by modern humans at an early stage, there is still debate over whether it remained habitable during the extreme cold of the Last Glacial Maximum or whether it was subsequently repopulated by peoples with recent shared ancestry. Previous studies of the genetic history of Siberian populations were hampered by the extensive admixture that appears to have taken place ...

This article evaluates bias in one class of methods used to estimate archaic admixture in modern humans. These methods study the pattern of allele sharing among modern and archaic genomes. They are sensitive to "ghost" admixture, which occurs when a population receives archaic DNA from sources not acknowledged by the statistical model. The effect of ghost admixture depends on two factors: branc...

Following up on our previous study, we conducted a genome-wide analysis of admixture for two Uyghur population samples (HGDP-UG and PanAsia-UG), collected from the northern and southern regions of Xinjiang in China, respectively. Both HGDP-UG and PanAsia-UG showed a substantial admixture of East-Asian (EAS) and European (EUR) ancestries, with an empirical estimation of ancestry contribution of ...

T he prevalence of type 2 diabetes is higher in populations of Native American ancestry, and in Hispanic American populations formed by admixture between Europeans and Native Americans, than in populations of European ancestry. One approach to distinguishing between environmental and genetic explanations for this difference is to study the relationship of type 2 diabetes risk to individual admi...

By comparing the sex-specifically inheritedX chromosome to the autosomes in ancient genetic samples,we (1) studied sex-specific admixture for two prehistoric migrations. For each migration we used several admixture estimation procedures—including ADMIXTURE model-based clustering (2)—to compare X-chromosomal and autosomal ancestry in contemporaneous Central Europeans and we interpreted greater a...

T he prevalence of type 2 diabetes is higher in populations of Native American ancestry, and in Hispanic American populations formed by admixture between Europeans and Native Americans, than in populations of European ancestry. One approach to distinguishing between environmental and genetic explanations for this difference is to study the relationship of type 2 diabetes risk to individual admi...

A method for simultaneously estimating the admixture proportions of a hybrid population and Wright's fixation index, FST, for that hybrid is presented. It is shown that the variance of admixture estimates can be partitioned into two components: (1) due to sample size, and (2) due to evolutionary variance (i.e., genetic drift). A chi-square test used to detect heterogeneity of admixture estimate...

Long-range migrations and the resulting admixtures between populations have been important forces shaping human genetic diversity. Most existing methods for detecting and reconstructing historical admixture events are based on allele frequency divergences or patterns of ancestry segments in chromosomes of admixed individuals. An emerging new approach harnesses the exponential decay of admixture...