The genetic male component of two South-Western Colombian populations.

In the recent history of Colombia, two factors have contributed to change the population structure, the Spanish conquest and the slave trading promoted principally by Portugal, England and Spain. As a consequence the native population of Colombia has been reduced and mixed with the European and African arriving groups. To assess the male ancestry of the Cauca population, we have examined the frequency of the major Y-chromosome lineages by typing 30 Y-SNPs in two populations from this region: 105 Afro-Colombian individuals and 110 Caucasian-Mestizo individuals. Among the 33 haplogroups defined with the SNPs analysed, 15 haplogroups were detected, 10 of them being shared by both populations. In order to investigate how the level of admixture is, and to compare the genetic background with other neighbour populations, other South American samples previously published were used for comparative analysis.