Empirical Distributions of F (ST) from Large-Scale Human Polymorphism Data

Studies of the apportionment of human genetic variation have long established that most human variation is within population groups and that the additional variation between population groups is small but greatest when comparing different continental populations. These studies often used Wright’s F (ST) that apportions the standardized variance in allele frequencies within and between population groups. Because local adaptations increase population differentiation, high-F (ST) may be found at closely linked loci under selection and used to identify genes undergoing directional or heterotic selection. We re-examined these processes using HapMap data. We analyzed 3 million SNPs on 602 samples from eight worldwide populations and a consensus subset of 1 million SNPs found in all populations. We identified four major features of the data: First, a hierarchically F (ST) analysis showed that only a paucity (12%) of the total genetic variation is distributed between continental populations and even a lesser genetic variation (1%) is found between intra-continental populations. Second, the global F (ST) distribution closely follows an exponential distribution. Third, although the overall F (ST) distribution is similarly shaped (inverse J), F (ST) distributions varies markedly by allele frequency when divided into non-overlapping groups by allele frequency range. Because the mean allele frequency is a crude indicator of allele age, these distributions mark the time-dependent change in genetic differentiation. Finally, the change in mean-F (ST) of these groups is linear in allele frequency. These results suggest that investigating the extremes of the F (ST) distribution for each allele frequency group is more efficient for detecting selection. Consequently, we demonstrate that such extreme SNPs are more clustered along the chromosomes than expected from linkage disequilibrium for each allele frequency group. These genomic regions are therefore likely candidates for natural selection.