GENETIC-STRUCTURE OF THE UTAH MORMONS - COMPARISON OF RESULTS BASED ON RFLPS, BLOOD-GROUPS, MIGRATION MATRICES, ISONYMY, AND PEDIGREES

The genetic structure of the Utah Mormon population is examined using 25 blood group and 47 RFLP alleles obtained from 442 subjects living i n 8 geographic subdivisions. Nei's G(ST) was 0.013 (p < 0.002) for the RFLP data and 0.012 (p > 0.4) for the blood group data, showing that only 1% of the genetic variance in this population can be attributed t o subdivision effects. A comparison of intersubdivision distance matri ces based on blood groups, RFLPs, migration matrices, isonymy, and ped igrees shows that genetic distances have relatively low and nonsignifi cant correlations with the other three types of data. However, the cor relations based on RFLPs are considerably higher than those based on b lood groups. Relationship matrices based on interindividual allele sha ring were compared with known genealogical kinship coefficients betwee n each pair of individuals. The correlation between the blood group an d RFLP relationship matrices was small but marginally significant usin g the Mantel test (r = 0.014, p < 0.06). The RFLP relationship matrix correlated more highly with genealogical kinship than did the blood gr oup relationship matrix (r = 0.023, p < 0.0001 and r = 0.012, p < 0.00 1, respectively). These correlations increased by approximately one or der of magnitude when pairs of subjects having zero kinship coefficien ts were excluded. These results show that genetic distances derived fr om RFLPs correlate more strongly with other types of kinship than do d istances based on blood groups. This probably reflects the fact that R FLPs are more neutral, have frequencies that are more accurately estim ated, and contain more information about DNA sequence variation.