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Jennifer B. Listman,1,2 Robert T. Malison,3,4 Atapol Sughondhabirom,5 Nuntika Thavichachart,5 Henry R. Kranzler,6 Sookjaroen Tangwonchai,5 Apiwat Mutirangura,5 Joel Gelernter,3,4 and Todd R. Disotell1,2 1Department of Anthropology, New York University, 2New York Consortium in Evolutionary Primatology (NYCEP), 3Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine, 4Veteran's Administration, Connecticutt, 5Chulalongkorn University Faculty of Medicine, Bangkok, Thailand, 6Department of Psychiatry, University of Connecticut School of Medicine Abstract The usefulness of microsatellite markers for interpopulation comparisons has been questioned due to the confounding effects of homoplasy. In this study we used a panel of 35 microsatellite markers to examine the effects of marker choice and possible homoplasy on interpopulation genetic distances and inferences of phylogenetic relationships for five human populations. Comparisons were made between six commonly used measures of genetic distance as well as the statistic delta, which is a measure of allele frequency differences between populations. Eleven tetranucleotide repeats and twenty-four dinucleotide repeats were used to create marker panels, varying content based on number of alleles per marker and repeat size. Using each panel, all distance measures were calculated and neighbor-joining trees were inferred. The efficacy of the statistic delta for inferring interpopulation relationships was also assessed. Results of this study shed light on issues of homoplasy and marker choice in studies of primate population genetics, using as an example, a species for which many markers are available. |