ENORMITY OF GENETIC DIVERSITY AMONG THE FOUR TRIBAL POPULATIONS OF CENTRAL INDIA AT 20 AUTOSOMAL DNA LOCI
Moumita Sinha* and Mitashree Mitra
ABSTRACT
The Indian sub-continent is one of the important constituent of South Asia with reservoir of enormous socio-cultural, racial and genetic diversities. Central India in particular has been a vibrant zone of the subcontinent, regularly receives a large number of invaders from every part of the country in the past. A series of invasions along with migrations can be seen in prehistoric and historic times that led to population admixture of various populations and strongly contributed to the present genetic variation in people of India. There is a long debate by the anthropologist over tribe-caste continuum, but many scientists have arrived at a common consensus that tribals are the original inhabitants of mainland of India. However, there is difference of opinion about their contributions to the non-tribal populations on the basis of their evolutionary history and biological characteristics. The present study investigates the genetic diversities and affinities in the four tribal populations namely; Bhaina, Dhur Gond, Kanwar and Kol of central India, which were not reported earlier. They belong to three different language families namely Austro-Asiatic (Kol), Dravidian (Dhur Gond) and Indo-European (Bhaina and Kanwar).The present research was carried out on 201 unrelated individuals up to three generations (50 samples of either sex from each population). Blood samples and socio-demographic data were collected with the individual informed written consent of the volunteer donors. Prior Ethical Clearance for conducting research was obtained from Institutional Ethics Committee. All the screened 20 autosomal markers were found to be polymorphic in all the populations and indicate fundamental genetic consistency among the population groups.
Keywords: Central India, Autosomal loci, tribes, haplotype, linkage disequilibrium.
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