Journal
PLOS ONE
Volume 10, Issue 9, Pages -Publisher
PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0135820
Keywords
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Categories
Funding
- Russian Science Foundation [14-14-00827]
- Programme of the Presidium of Russian Academy of Sciences Molecular and cell biology
- Russian Foundation For Basic Research [13-04-01711, 13-06-00670, 13-04-90420]
- Ukrainian State Fund for Fundamental Researches [F53.4/071]
- European Union European Regional Development Fund through the Centre of Excellence in Genomics
- European Commission [205419 ECOGENE]
- Estonian Basic Research Grant [SF 0270177s08]
- Estonian Research Council [IUT24-1]
- Wellcome Trust [098051]
- LITGEN project - European Social Fund under the Global Grant Measure [VP1-3.1-SMM-07-K-01-013]
- Center for Genomics and Transcriptomics (CeGaT GmbH)
- Russian Science Foundation [14-14-00827] Funding Source: Russian Science Foundation
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The Slavic branch of the Balto-Slavic sub-family of Indo-European languages underwent rapid divergence as a result of the spatial expansion of its speakers from Central-East Europe, in early medieval times. This expansion-mainly to East Europe and the northern Balkans-resulted in the incorporation of genetic components from numerous autochthonous populations into the Slavic gene pools. Here, we characterize genetic variation in all extant ethnic groups speaking Balto-Slavic languages by analyzing mitochondrial DNA (n = 6,876), Y-chromosomes (n = 6,079) and genome-wide SNP profiles (n = 296), within the context of other European populations. We also reassess the phylogeny of Slavic languages within the Balto-Slavic branch of Indo-European. We find that genetic distances among Balto-Slavic populations, based on autosomal and Y-chromosomal loci, show a high correlation (0.9) both with each other and with geography, but a slightly lower correlation (0.7) with mitochondrial DNA and linguistic affiliation. The data suggest that genetic diversity of the present-day Slavs was predominantly shaped in situ, and we detect two different substrata: 'central-east European' for West and East Slavs, and 'south-east European' for South Slavs. A pattern of distribution of segments identical by descent between groups of East-West and South Slavs suggests shared ancestry or a modest gene flow between those two groups, which might derive from the historic spread of Slavic people.
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