Maternal and paternal lineages in Albania and the genetic structure of Indo-European populations

Mitochondrial DNA HV1 sequences and Y chromosome haplotypes (DYS19 STR and YAP) were characterised in an Albanian sample and compared with those of se veral other Indo-European populations from the European continent. No signi ficant difference was observed between Albanians and most other Europeans, despite the fact that Albanians are clearly different from all other Indo-E uropeans linguistically. We observe a general lack of genetic structure amo ng Indo-European populations for both maternal and paternal polymorphisms, as well as low levels of correlation between linguistics and genetics, even though slightly more significant for the Y chromosome than for mtDNA. Alto gether, our results show that the linguistic structure of continental Indo- European populations is not reflected in the variability of the mitochondri al and Y chromosome markers. This discrepancy could be due to very recent d ifferentiation of Indo-European populations in Europe and/or substantial am ounts of gene flow among these populations.