Shaping the Genetic Landscape of Northeast India

The genetic landscape of South Asia is intriguing. In a vast geographical region like India, mostly genes follow geography. Moreover, at neighbouring regions like East and Southeast Asia, language is the major denominator of the genes. However, these are not just the two alternatives, in many geographical pockets, ethnicity plays a stronger role than either of these. Being a crossroad of South and Southeast Asia, the Himalayan region is mostly populated by the people speaking the Trans-Himalayan language. Archaeological and anthropological studies suggest migration and cultural diffusion in this region with the Tibetan plateau in the North. To understand this complex pattern, we have performed a fine-grained genetic analysis of the major Mizo population and its various clans living at the Himalayan geography. We have investigated 110 individuals belonging to seven different clans of Mizo people for hundred thousand of autosomal markers. In contrast to the East and Southeast Asian genetic landscape, our results suggested that the fine-scaled genetic structure of Northeast India is much more complex and mixture of interplay between languages, ethnicity and geography. Allelic frequency-based analyses indicated that a novel Trans-Himalayan ancestry unite all the populations of this region.

• Type: Other
• Archiver: European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA)