Genetic formation of Sui populations in southwest China

The Sui people living in Guizhou province have a unique ethnic culture and population history due to their long-time isolation from other populations. To investigate the genetic structure of Sui populations in different regions of Guizhou, we genotyped 89 individuals from four Sui populations using genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms arrays. We analyzed the data using principal component analysis, ADMIXTURE analysis, f-statistics, qpWave/qpAdm, TreeMix analysis, fineSTRUCTURE, and GLOBETROTTER. We found that Sui populations in Guizhou were genetically homogeneous and had a close genetic affinity with Tai-Kadai-speaking populations, Hmong-Mien-speaking Hmong, and some ancient populations from southern China. The Sui populations could be modeled as an admixture of 33.5%-37.9% of Yellow River Basin farmer-related ancestry and 62.1%-66.5% of Southeast Asian-related ancestry, indicating that the southward expansion of northern East Asian-related ancestry influenced the formation of the Tai-Kadai-speaking Sui people. Future publications of more ancient genomics in southern China could effectively provide further insight into the demographic history and population structure of the Sui people. Fine-scale genetic structure among Sui and other reference populations. (A-C) Principal component analysis based on the coancestry matrix. (D, E) Individual-based pairwise coincidence matrix and phylogenetic tree. dagger image