0000000000529995
AUTHOR
Gianmarco Ferri
Moors and Saracens in Europe: estimating the medieval North African male legacy in southern Europe.
To investigate the male genetic legacy of the Arab rule in southern Europe during medieval times, we focused on specific Northwest African haplogroups and identified evolutionary close STR-defined haplotypes in Iberia, Sicily and the Italian peninsula. Our results point to a higher recent Northwest African contribution in Iberia and Sicily in agreement with historical data, southern Italian regions known to have experienced long-term Arab presence also show an enrichment of Northwest African types. The forensic and genomic implications of these findings are discussed.
The Greeks in the West: genetic signatures of the Hellenic colonisation in southern Italy and Sicily
Greek colonisation of South Italy and Sicily (Magna Graecia) was a defining event in European cultural history, although the demographic processes and genetic impacts involved have not been systematically investigated. Here, we combine high-resolution surveys of the variability at the uni-parentally inherited Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA in selected samples of putative source and recipient populations with forward-in-time simulations of alternative demographic models to detect signatures of that impact. Using a subset of haplotypes chosen to represent historical sources, we recover a clear signature of Greek ancestry in East Sicily compatible with the settlement from Euboea during the…
Shared language, diverging genetic histories: high-resolution analysis of Y-chromosome variability in Calabrian and Sicilian Arbereshe.
The relationship between genetic and linguistic diversification in human populations has been often explored to interpret some specific issues in human history. The Albanian-speaking minorities of Sicily and Southern Italy (Arbereshe) constitute an important portion of the ethnolinguistic variability of Italy. Their linguistic isolation from neighboring Italian populations and their documented migration history, make such minorities particularly effective for investigating the interplay between cultural, geographic and historical factors. Nevertheless, the extent of Arbereshe genetic relationships with the Balkan homeland and the Italian recipient populations has been only partially investi…
WITHDRAWN: Corrigendum to ‘Development of an Italian RM Y-STR haplotype database: results of the 2013 GEFI collaborative exercise’ [Forensic. Sci. Int. Genet. 15 (2015) 56-63]
An inconsistency in the nomenclature used for the rapidly mutating (RM) Y-chromosomal short tandem repeat (Y-STR) marker DYS449 was noted in the above paper. In this paper, the DYS449 allele nomenclature introduced by Ballantyne et al. was used, instead of that described by Redd et al. and subsequently adopted by the International RM Y-STR User Group and in the AMPFlSTR® YFiler Plus kit.
Development of an Italian RM Y-STR haplotype database: Results of the 2013 GEFI collaborative exercise.
Recently introduced rapidly mutating Y-chromosomal short tandem repeat (RM Y-STR) loci, displaying a multiple-fold higher mutation rate relative to any other Y-STRs, including those conventionally used in forensic casework, have been demonstrated to improve the resolution of male lineage differentiation and to allow male relative separation usually impossible with standard Y-STRs. However, large and geographically-detailed frequency haplotype databases are required to estimate the statistical weight of RM Y-STR haplotype matches if observed in forensic casework. With this in mind, the Italian Working Group (GEFI) of the International Society for Forensic Genetics launched a collaborative ex…