Forensic Science International: Genetics Supplement Series
Research articlePeruvian genetic structure and their impact in the identification of Andean missing persons: A perspective from Ayacucho
Introduction
In Peru, since 1980–2000, we lived a period of violence with thousands of missing persons. In this context, there are about 15,000 missing persons and the largest percentages of this correspond to Ayacucho (south-central area of Peru). It all started on the one hand, the social and political change through armed struggle as part of extremist ideologies and even messianic rebel groups, and the other by the State's response in order to suppress terrorism.
Identification process is complex because in the DNA identification process, we observed in the some Ayacucho cases random matches among unrelated individuals and the factor of limited number of relatives samples because some relatives are dead or also they are missing persons. In this context, we need to know the genetic structure and the relationship within and between these Peruvian populations and also in this way we could explain in Ayacucho population the causes of these random matches and have a good criteria to estimate de significance of our matches among remains and relatives databases.
Section snippets
Materials and methods
The study involved the analysis of population genetic structure in 880 individuals corresponding to 20 of the 24 departments of Peru, including the department of Ayacucho. These populations were analyzed for 15 autosomal STR markers AMPFℓSTR Kit Identifiler in order to understand the relationships between the Peruvian populations and the possibility of population genetic groups in Peru. Also to know more deeply the genetic structure in Ayacucho population, we analyzed in 203 individuals, 16
Results and discussion
The analysis of delta–mu in Peruvian populations show three clusters (Fig. 1). The degree of differentiation in these three groups was low but significant between groups in the AMOVA analysis (0.47%** (P < 0.01)). These differences were similar to those found in other populations such as those found in population of Finland [1]. It is interesting to note that the clustering obtained have correlation to the linguistic division proposed for the Peruvian population [2], where there are a Central
Role of funding
The research was conducted with funding from the Public Ministry and Qiagen support.
Conflict of interest
None.
References (4)
- et al.
Genetic differentiation in South Amerindians is related to environmental and cultural diversity: evidence from the Y chromosome
Am. J. Hum. Genet.
(2001) - et al.
Population substructure in Finland and Sweden revealed by the use of spatial coordinates and a small number of unlinked autosomal SNPs
BMC Genet.
(2008)