Population Genetics of Latvians in the Context of Admixture between North-Eastern European Ethnic Groups
Published Online: Jun 21, 2018
Page range: 131 - 151
Received: Jul 24, 2017
Accepted: Jan 02, 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/prolas-2018-0025
Keywords
© 2018 Astrīda Krūmiņa et al., published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.
This article presents a review on population genetics of Latvians, which alongside Lithuanians are the two extant Baltic speaking populations. The article provides a description of genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data and contains a comparative analysis of the results of studies performed on classical autosomal genetic markers, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and the non-recombining part of the Y chromosome (NRY), with data on neighbouring populations. The study also covers data of recently performed ancient DNA (aDNA) studies carried out on samples from the territory of today’s Latvia. The results of population genetic studies have shown a mixture of eastern and western genetic traits in present-day Latvians with only small differences between Latvian subpopulations. Studies of the Baltic “tribal gene” LW