MAPPING THE HAPLOGROUP OF INDIAN AND ZOROASTRIAN – PARSI MITOCHONDRIAL GENOME AND PHYLOGENETIC ANALYSIS TO DETECT THE INCIDENCES OF ADMIXTURE

Abstract: Zoroastrian-Parsi's people belong to the Persian community, who emigrated to India between 785 and 936 A.D. after the Arab invasion. They are the proponents of Zoroastrianism faith and have endogamous culture.Since they have settled in India for a long time we hypothesized that though they were endogamous there might be incidences of admixture with the Indian population. In order to test this, we built a phylogenetic tree using mitochondrial sequences of both the Indian and Pharsi population. We used 97 Indian mitochondrial sequences representing different communities from different regions of India and 64 Zoroastrian-Parsi mitochondrial genome sequences from different parts of India and a single african mitochondrial genome sequence as an outgroup. We built a maximum likelihood phylogenetic tree and mapped sequence specific haplogroups and their variants on the phylogenetic tree.The phylogenetic analysis showed admixture to have taken place at many instances. A total of 6 major haplogroups with a maximum of 12 sub-haplogroups were identified as mapped on the tree. The co clustering of common as well as unique variants of different haplogroups in some clades suggest multiple admixture events to have happened between the Zoroastrian-Parsi and Indian populations.which raise remarks on their endogamous culture.

Keywords: Mitochondrial genome, Haplogroups, Phylogenetic analysis, Admixture.