Questioning the "melting pot": analysis of Alu inserts in three population samples from Uruguay

The way that immigrants integrate into recipient societies has been discussed for decades, mainly from the perspective of the social sciences. Uruguay, as other American countries, received diffferent waves of European immigrants, although the details of the process of assimilation, when it did occur, are unclear. In this study we used genetic markers to understand the process experienced by the Basques, one of the major migration waves that populated Uruguay, and their relation to other immigrants, as well as to Native American and African descendants. For this purpose, we analyzed the allele frequencies of 10 ALU loci (A25, ACE, APOA1, B65, D1, F13B, PV92, TPA25, HS2.43, and HS4.65) in three samples from Uruguay (two of Basque descendants, one of non-Basque descendants) from two locations: Montevideo and Trinidad. No departure from Hardy-Weinberg expectations was observed, with the exceptions of the APOA1 and D1 loci in the non-Basque descendants' samples. Our data show that the major genetic contribution in the three samples comes from Europe (78-88%), with minor African (10-15%) and Native American (0-10%) contributions. Genetic distances reveal that Basque descendants from Trinidad cluster with Europeans, whereas both Montevideo samples cluster together and are separate from other populations, showing two diffferent types of integration, related to the general characteristics of each regional population.