Sequence differences at orthologous microsatellites inflate estimates of human-chimpanzee differentiation

BMC Genomics

Table 1 Comparison of heterozygosity and measures of variation across individuals at outlier and non-outlier microsatellites

Variable	Chimpanzee				Human
	Tri		Tetra		Tri		Tetra
	RDM	P	RDM	P	RDM	P	RDM	P
Heterozygosity (H_e)	0.258	7.97 × 10 ^-5	0.395	3.88 × 10 ^-7	1.010	0.595	0.986	0.469
Number of distinct alleles	0.532	2.47 × 10 ^-4	0.795	0.150	0.999	0.444	1.046	0.299
Variance in the number of repeats	0.293	0.001	0.868	0.122	1.298	0.104	1.314	0.958
Range of the number of repeats	0.556	0.001	0.865	0.722	1.050	0.274	1.050	0.279
Skewness in the number of repeats	4.549	0.012	3.349	0.004	0.650	0.627	1.331	0.606
Mean PCR fragment length	0.898	0.365	0.856	0.167	0.932	0.532	0.953	0.737
Mean number of repeats	0.637	2.28 × 10 ^-5	0.558	1.06 × 10 ^-6	0.882	0.094	0.937	0.223
Maximum number of repeats	0.654	1.78 × 10 ^-4	0.755	7.50 × 10 ^-4	0.940	0.274	0.953	0.596
Minimum number of repeats	0.823	0.038	0.628	7.35 × 10 ^-4	0.838	0.029	0.859	0.087

Wilcoxon rank sum tests are shown for comparisons of continuous microsatellite sequence properties between the 7 tri- and 10 tetra-nucleotide single STR outlier microsatellites and the 24 and 68 single STR tri- and tetra-nucleotide non-outlier microsatellites. Relative difference in means (RDM) was calculated by dividing the mean of the variable among the outlier microsatellites by the mean of the variable among the non-outlier microsatellites. P < 0.05 are shown in bold.

ISSN: 1471-2164