Population relationships based on 170 ancestry SNPs from the combined Kidd and Seldin panels

The benefits of ancestry informative SNP (AISNP) panels can best accrue and be properly evaluated only as sufficient reference population data become readily accessible. Ideally the set of reference populations should approximate the genetic diversity of human populations worldwide. The Kidd and Seldin AISNP sets are two panels that have separately accumulated thus far the largest and most diverse collections of data on human reference populations from the major continental regions. A recent tally in the ALFRED allele frequency database finds 164 reference populations available for all the 55 Kidd AISNPs and 132 reference populations for all the 128 Seldin AISNPs. Although much more of the genetic diversity in human populations around the world still needs to be documented, 81 populations have genotype data available for all 170 AISNPs in the union of the Kidd and Seldin panels. In this report we examine admixture and principal component analyses on these 81 worldwide populations and some regional subsets of these reference populations to determine how well the combined panel illuminates population relationships. Analyses of this dataset that focused on Native American populations revealed very strong cluster patterns associated with many of the individual populations studied.