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Punctuated bursts in human male demography inferred from 1,244 worldwide Y-chromosome sequences

Abstract

We report the sequences of 1,244 human Y chromosomes randomly ascertained from 26 worldwide populations by the 1000 Genomes Project. We discovered more than 65,000 variants, including single-nucleotide variants, multiple-nucleotide variants, insertions and deletions, short tandem repeats, and copy number variants. Of these, copy number variants contribute the greatest predicted functional impact. We constructed a calibrated phylogenetic tree on the basis of binary single-nucleotide variants and projected the more complex variants onto it, estimating the number of mutations for each class. Our phylogeny shows bursts of extreme expansion in male numbers that have occurred independently among each of the five continental superpopulations examined, at times of known migrations and technological innovations.

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Figure 1: Discovery and validation of a representative Y-chromosome CNV.
Figure 2: Y-chromosome phylogeny and haplogroup distribution.
Figure 3: Mutation events.
Figure 4: Explosive male-lineage expansions of the last 15,000 years.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the 1000 Genomes Project sample donors for making this work possible, all Project members for their contributions, and A. Martin for ADMIXTURE results. The tree in Figure 2 was drawn using FigTree. G.D.P. was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship under grant DGE-1147470 and by National Library of Medicine training grant LM-007033. Work at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (Q.A., R.B., M.C., Y.C., S.L., A. Massaia, S.A. McCarthy, C.T.-S., Y.X., and F.Y.) was supported by Wellcome Trust grant 098051. F.L.M. was supported by National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant 1R01GM090087, by NSF grant DMS-1201234, and by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Stanford Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics (CEHG). T.F.W. was supported by an AWS Education Grant, and the work of T.F.W., M.G., and Y.E. was supported in part by NIJ award 2014-DN-BX-K089. M.C. is supported by a Fundación Barrié Fellowship. H.S. and L. Coin are supported by Australian Research Council grants DP140103164 and FT110100972, respectively. M.G. was supported by a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. G.R.S.R. was supported by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and the Sanger Institute through an EBI–Sanger Postdoctoral Fellowship. X.Z.-B., P.F., D.R.Z., and L. Clarke were supported by Wellcome Trust grants 085532, 095908, and 104947 and by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. P.A.U. was supported by SAP grant SP0#115016. C.L. was supported in part by NIH grant U41HG007497. Y.E. holds a Career Award at the Scientific Interface from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. C.D.B. was supported by NIH grant 5R01HG003229-09.

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Contributions

G.D.P., Y.X., C.D.B., and C.T.-S. conceived and designed the project. R.B., S.L., and F.Y. generated FISH data. A. Malhotra, M.R., E.C., C.Z., and C.L. generated aCGH data. G.D.P., Y.X., F.L.M., T.F.W., A. Massaia, M.A.W.S., Q.A., S.A. McCarthy, A.N., S.K., Y.C., J.L.R.-F., M.C., H.S., M.G., R.D., G.R.S.R., T.W.F., E.G., A. Marcketta, D.M., X.Z.-B., G.R.A., S.A. McCarroll, P.F., P.A.U., L. Coin, D.R.Z., L. Clarke, A.A., Y.E., R.E.H., C.D.B., and C.T.-S. analyzed the data. G.D.P., Y.X., F.L.M., T.F.W., A. Massaia, M.A.W.S., Q.A., and C.T.-S. wrote the manuscript. All authors reviewed, revised, and provided feedback on the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Carlos D Bustamante or Chris Tyler-Smith.

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Competing interests

G.D.P. and A.A. are employees of 23andMe. P.F. is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) for Omicia, Inc. P.A.U. has consulted for and owns stock options of 23andMe. Y.E. is an SAB member of Identify Genomics, BigDataBio, and Solve, Inc. C.D.B. is on the SABs of AncestryDNA, BigDataBio, Etalon DX, Liberty Biosecurity, and Personalis. He is also a founder and SAB chair of IdentifyGenomics. None of these entities had a role in the design, execution, interpretation, or presentation of this study.

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A list of members and affiliations appears in the Supplementary Note.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Text and Figures

Supplementary Figures 1–31, Supplementary Tables 1–19 and Supplementary Note. (PDF 16615 kb)

Supplementary Data

Supplementary Data on SNVs, CNVs, STRs, haplogroups, phylogenetic analyses, functional annotations, mtDNA analysis, and expansion analyses. (ZIP 6186 kb)

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Poznik, G., Xue, Y., Mendez, F. et al. Punctuated bursts in human male demography inferred from 1,244 worldwide Y-chromosome sequences. Nat Genet 48, 593–599 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3559

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