The Great Migration and African-American Genomic Diversity
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
5-1-2016
Publication Title
Plos Genetics
Abstract
We present a comprehensive assessment of genomic diversity in the African-American population by studying three genotyped cohorts comprising 3,726 African-Americans from across the United States that provide a representative description of the population across all US states and socioeconomic status. An estimated 82.1% of ancestors to African-Americans lived in Africa prior to the advent of transatlantic travel, 16.7% in Europe, and 1.2% in the Americas, with increased African ancestry in the southern United States compared to the North and West. Combining demographic models of ancestry and those of relatedness suggests that admixture occurred predominantly in the South prior to the Civil War and that ancestry-biased migration is responsible for regional differences in ancestry. We find that recent migrations also caused a strong increase in genetic relatedness among geographically distant African-Americans. Long-range relatedness among African-Americans and between African-Americans and European-Americans thus track north-and west-bound migration routes followed during the Great Migration of the twentieth century. By contrast, short-range relatedness patterns suggest comparable mobility of similar to 15-16km per generation for African-Americans and European-Americans, as estimated using a novel analytical model of isolation-by-distance.
DOI
10.1371/journal.pgen.1006059
Dartmouth Digital Commons Citation
Baharian, Soheil; Barakatt, Maxime; Gignoux, Christopher R.; Shringarpure, Suyash; Errington, Jacob; Blot, William J.; Bustamante, Carlos D.; Kenney, Eimear E.; Williams, Scott M.; Aldrich, Melinda C.; and Gravel, Simon, "The Great Migration and African-American Genomic Diversity" (2016). Dartmouth Scholarship. 385.
https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/facoa/385
