A genomewide comparison of population structure at STRPs and nearby SNPs in humans

Patterns of population structure provide insights into evolutionary processes and help identify groups of individuals for genotype-phenotype association studies. With increasing availability of polymorphic molecular markers across genomes, the examination of population structure using large numbers of unlinked loci has become a common practice in evolutionary biology and human genetics. The two classes of molecular variation most widely used for this purpose, short tandem repeat polymorphisms (STRPs) and single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), differ in mutational properties expected to affect population structure. To measure the relative ability of these loci to describe population structure, we compared diversity at neighboring STRPs and SNPs from 720 genomic regions in the four populations that comprise the Human HapMap. Comparing loci from the same genomic regions allowed us to focus on the contribution of mutational differences (rather than variation in genealogical history) to disparities in population structure between STRPs and SNPs. Relative to average values for SNPs from the same regions, STRPs had lower F(st), but higher G(st)' and I(n) values. STRP-SNP correlations in population structure across genomic regions were statistically significant but weak in magnitude. Separate analyses by repeat type showed that these correlations were driven primarily by tetranucleotide and trinucleotide STRPs; measures of population structure at dinucleotides and SNPs were not significantly correlated. Pairwise comparisons among populations revealed effects of divergence time on differences in population structure between STRPs and SNPs. Collectively, these results confirm that individual STRPs can provide more information about population structure than individual SNPs, but suggest that the difference in structure at STRPs and SNPs depends on local genealogical history. Our study motivates theoretical comparisons of population structure at loci with different mutational properties.