The Peopling of Europe from the Mitochondrial Haplogroup U5 Perspective
Boris Malyarchuk1*, Miroslava Derenko1, Tomasz Grzybowski2, Maria Perkova1, Urszula Rogalla2, Tomas Vanecek3, Iosif Tsybovsky4
1 Institute of Biological Problems of the North, Far-East Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Magadan, Russian Federation, 2 Department of Molecular and Forensic Genetics, Ludwik Rydygier Collegium Medicum, Institute of Forensic Medicine, The Nicolaus Copernicus University, Bydgoszcz, Poland, 3 Department of Pathology, Medical Faculty Hospital, Charles University, Pilsen, Czech Republic, 4 Centre of Forensic Expertise and Criminalistics, Minsk, Belarus
Abstract
It is generally accepted that the most ancient European mitochondrial haplogroup, U5, has evolved essentially in Europe. To resolve the phylogeny of this haplogroup, we completely sequenced 113 mitochondrial genomes (79 U5a and 34 U5b) of central and eastern Europeans (Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Russians and Belorussians), and reconstructed a detailed phylogenetic tree, that incorporates previously published data. Molecular dating suggests that the coalescence time estimate for the U5 is ~25–30 thousand years (ky), and ~16–20 and ~20–24 ky for its subhaplogroups U5a and U5b, respectively. Phylogeographic analysis reveals that expansions of U5 subclusters started earlier in central and southern Europe, than in eastern Europe. In addition, during the Last Glacial Maximum central Europe (probably, the Carpathian Basin) apparently represented the area of intermingling between human flows from refugial zones in the Balkans, the Mediterranean coastline and the Pyrenees. Age estimations amounting for many U5 subclusters in eastern Europeans to ~15 ky ago and less are consistent with the view that during the Ice Age eastern Europe was an inhospitable place for modern humans.
Citation: Malyarchuk B, Derenko M, Grzybowski T, Perkova M, Rogalla U, et al. (2010) The Peopling of Europe from the Mitochondrial Haplogroup U5 Perspective. PLoS ONE 5(4): e10285. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010285
Editor: M. Thomas P. Gilbert, Natural History Museum of Denmark, Denmark
Received: February 12, 2010; Accepted: March 30, 2010; Published: April 21, 2010
Copyright: © 2010 Malyarchuk et al. 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.
Funding: The study was supported by the Program of Presidium of Russian Academy of Sciences “Biodiversity (Gene Pools and Genetic Diversity)”, the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (07-04-00445) and the grant from the Nicolaus Copernicus University, Poland (UMK 03/2007). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0010285