Abstract

RUSSO, María Gabriela et al. Evaluation of the minimum number of markers for individual ancestry estimation in an Argentinean population sample. Rev. Mus. Antropol. [online]. 2016, vol.9, n.1, pp.49-56. ISSN 1852-060X.

Estimation of individual ancestry has great relevance when studying population composition in regions like South America, where intensive admixture processes have occurred, being also important in biomedical sciences. For that reason, it is important to assess the factors that may affect the reliability of results. In this work, we investigate the minimum number of ancestry informative markers (AIMs) for obtaining acceptable estimations of ancestry. As an example, we take individuals from a population sample of different Argentinean regions. Considering a three component model (Native American, Eurasian and Sub-Saharan), we calculated ancestry of 441 individuals using 10, 20, 30 and 50 AIMs. The results indicate that the number of markers affects ancestry estimation and its accuracy increases with AIMs number. When compared to previous estimations obtained from 99 AIMs, the result shows that at least 30 markers are needed to achieve good correlation values for the minority component (Sub-Saharan in this case). For individual ancestry studies, we suggest to take into account not only the number of markers, but also its informativeness and the background of the studied population.

Keywords : Number of AIMs; Individual ancestry; Argentinean population.

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