Type
ArticleKAUST Department
Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering (BESE) DivisionBioscience Program
Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC)
Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Science and Engineering (CEMSE) Division
KAUST Grant Number
BAS/1/1059/01/01Date
2021-01-11Submitted Date
2020-02-06Permanent link to this record
http://hdl.handle.net/10754/666934
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Modern day Saudi Arabia occupies the majority of historical Arabia, which may have contributed to ancient waves of migration out of Africa. This ancient history has left a lasting imprint in the genetics of the region, including the diverse set of tribes that call Saudi Arabia their home. How these tribes relate to each other and to the world’s major populations remains an unanswered question. In an attempt to improve our understanding of the population structure of Saudi Arabia, we conducted genomic profiling of 957 unrelated individuals who self-identify with 28 large tribes in Saudi Arabia. Consistent with the tradition of intra-tribal unions, the subjects showed strong clustering along tribal lines with the distance between clusters correlating with their geographical proximities in Arabia. However, these individuals form a unique cluster when compared to the world’s major populations. The ancient origin of these tribal affiliations is supported by analyses that revealed little evidence of ancestral origin from within the 28 tribes. Our results disclose a granular map of population structure and have important implications for future genetic studies into Mendelian and common diseases in the region.Citation
Mineta, K., Goto, K., Gojobori, T., & Alkuraya, F. S. (2021). Population structure of indigenous inhabitants of Arabia. PLOS Genetics, 17(1), e1009210. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1009210Sponsors
We thank the study participants for their enthusiastic participation. We also thank the Genotyping and Sequencing Core Facilities at KFSH&RC for their technical support. We are grateful to Mais Hashem, Niema Ibrahim and Firdous Abdulwahab for their help as research coordinators and to Reem Alsuwailem for her help in data collection. We are extremely grateful to Prof. Rodriguez-Flores and his colleagues at Cornell University for their generosity with sharing the Qatari Genome data.We acknowledge the support of the Saudi Human Genome Project, King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology to FSA and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (BAS/1/1059/01/01) to TG. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Publisher
Public Library of Science (PLoS)Journal
PLOS GeneticsPubMed ID
33428619Additional Links
https://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1009210ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1371/journal.pgen.1009210
Scopus Count
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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