Ancestral Information Analysis of Chinese Korean Ethnic Group via a Novel Multiplex DIP System

Deletion/insertion polymorphism (DIP) is one of the more promising genetic markers in the field of forensic genetics for personal identification and biogeographic ancestry inference. In this research, we used an in-house developed ancestry-informative marker-DIP system, including 56 autosomal diallelic DIPs, three Y-chromosomal DIPs, and an Amelogenin gene, to analyze the genetic polymorphism and ancestral composition of the Chinese Korean group, as well as to explore its genetic relationships with the 26 reference populations. The results showed that this novel panel exhibited high genetic polymorphism in the studied Korean group and could be effectively applied for forensic individual identification in the Korean group. In addition, the results of multiple population genetic analyses indicated that the ancestral component of the Korean group was dominated by northern East Asia. Moreover, the Korean group was more closely related to the East Asian populations, especially to the Japanese population in Tokyo. This study enriched the genetic data of the Korean ethnic group in China and provided information on the ancestry of the Korean group from the perspective of population genetics.