HUMAN POPULATION GENETICS

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Our major interest is human evolution, taking advantage of the new developments in molecular genetics. To this aim we study polymorphisms of nuclear DNA, and we want to continue and bring to a reasonable conclusion our tests of 100 restriction fragment length polymorphisms (RFLPs on at least 15-20 aboriginal populations of the entire world. With modern automation techniques, the completion of this part of the project will be faster. Using these RFLP data as a basis of comparison, we want to effect the transition to PCRPs (PCR polymorphisms) which are more efficient, and will allow us to examine more populations. For some categories of PCRPs, which are especially attractive from a technical point of view (CA repeats), there are potential difficulties in interpretation and we prefer to adopt a multiple strategy, by analyzing two or three different types of PCR ;markers. We propose to test initially both CA repeats and ASO (allele- specific oligonucleotides detected PCRPs, and possibly others. It is also important to start with polymorphisms selected on multiracial samples to avoid the bias present in all polymorphisms so far studied, that were initially selected on Europeans. We also plan to continue our studies of parallelism of genetic and linguistic evolutionary trees, and other correlations between genetic and cultural phenomena.