Patterns of genetic connectedness between modern and medieval Estonian genomes reveal the origins of a major ancestry component of the Finnish population.

ABSTRACT: The Finnish population is a unique example of a genetic isolate affected by a recent founder event. Previous studies have suggested that the ancestors of Finnic-speaking Finns and Estonians reached the circum-Baltic region by the 1^st millennium BC. However, high linguistic similarity points to a more recent split of their languages. To study genetic connectedness between Finns and Estonians directly, we first assessed the efficacy of imputation of low-coverage ancient genomes by sequencing a medieval Estonian genome to high depth (23×) and evaluated the performance of its down-sampled replicas. We find that ancient genomes imputed from >0.1× coverage can be reliably used in principal-component analyses without projection. By searching for long shared allele intervals (LSAIs; sim

SUBMITTER: Kivisild T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8456179 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature