查看文章

The Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic Ocean are inhabited by a small population, whose origin is thought to date back to the Viking Age. Historical, archaeological and linguistic evidence indicates that the present population of the Faroe Islands may have a mixture of Scandinavian and British Isles ancestry. In the present study we used 122 new and 19 previously published hypervariable region I sequences of the mitochondrial control region to analyse the genetic diversity of the Faroese population and compare it with other populations in the North Atlantic region. The analyses suggested that the Faroese mtDNA pool has been affected by genetic drift, and is among the most homogenous and isolated in the North Atlantic region. This will have implications for attempts to locate genes for complex disorders. To obtain estimates of Scandinavian vs British Isles ancestry proportions, we applied a frequency-based …