Pathans partly descended from Greeks, claims research February 11, 2007
Posted by grhomeboy in HMN>HellenicLightAsia.trackback
Researchers in Pakistan have provided evidence in support of the Greek origins for a small proportion of Pathans.
The study was conducted by researchers from Biomedical and Genetic Engineering Division of the Dr A Q Khan Research Laboratories (Pakistan), Unit of Prenatal Diagnosis (Greece), Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (UK) and the Department of Genetics at Stanford University (US).
The research has been published in the latest edition of European Journal of Human Genetics as “Y-chromosomal evidence for a limited Greek contribution to the Pathan population of Pakistan.”
It investigated the origin and the genetic relationship of these three Pakistani populations with the extant Greek population. The research was done by typing a large set of markers from the male-specific region of the Y-chromosome in 77 Greeks and 875 Pakistani individuals.
The DNA samples of 952 unrelated males were analysed, extracted directly from peripheral blood mononuclear cells in the case of the Greek samples and from the EBV-transformed lymphoblastoid cell lines for the Pakistani samples.
The Pakistani samples included Burusho, Kailash and Pathan individuals whose informed consent was obtained. Values were estimated based on STR variation within haplogroups.
Population pair-wise genetic distances were calculated and median-joining networks were constructed using a five-fold range weighting scheme whereby weights assigned were specific for the haplogroup and took into account the Y-STR variation across the haplogroup in the Pakistani and Greek populations.
The network was also used to estimate the time to the most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) and a genetic distance matrix was used to construct phylogenetic tree by neighbour-joining method.
The combination of biallelic markers identified 12 Y-chromosomal haplogroups or lineages in the Greeks, 17 in the Burusho and 15 in the Pathan populations, while only eight Y lineages were found in the Kalash population.
