ALLELE AND HAPLOTYPE FREQUENCY-DISTRIBUTION OF THE ECORI, RSAI, AND MSPI COL1A2 RFLPS AMONG VARIOUS HUMAN-POPULATIONS

The EcoRI, RsaI, and MspI RFLPs (restriction fragment length polymorph isms) of the COL1A2 gene, one of the two genes that encode for the pol ypeptides of type I collagen, have been studied in four West African a nd two Asian populations to evaluate their potential effectiveness as anthropological markers. All three RFLPs were in Hardy-Weinberg equili brium. The comparisons between present data on two of the major human groups and those on Europeans and Amerindians show a considerable hete rogeneity for each of the three RFLPs under study. EcoRI, in particula r, appears to be highly effective in distinguishing Africans, European s, and Asians from each other. As expected, the analysis at the haplot ype level considerably improves the discriminating efficiency of these three markers by creating a clear-cut distinction between Tharus and Indonesians, the two Asian populations of the present survey. In fact, even though these two populations exhibit the same frequencies for th e RsaI and MspI alleles, the frequency of the MspI(-) allele among the RsaI(-) chromosomes is 0.5 +/- 0.14 in the Indonesian sample and 0 0.04 in the Tharu sample.