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Strains of JC virus in Amerind‐speakers of North America (Salish) and South America (Guaraní), Na‐Dene‐speakers of New Mexico (Navajo), and modern Japanese suggest links through an ancestral Asian population †
Author(s) -
FernandezCobo Mariana,
Agostini Hansjürgen T.,
Britez Graciela,
Ryschkewitsch Caroline F.,
Stoner Gerald L.
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
american journal of physical anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.146
H-Index - 119
eISSN - 1096-8644
pISSN - 0002-9483
DOI - 10.1002/ajpa.10085
Subject(s) - navajo , population , geography , medicine , linguistics , environmental health , philosophy
Previously we showed that strains of human polyoma virus JC among the Navajo in New Mexico, speakers of an Athapaskan language in the Na‐Dene language phylum, and among the Salish people in Montana, speakers of a language of the Salishan group in the Amerind family, were mainly of a northeast Asian genotype found in Japan (type 2A). We now report partial VP1‐gene, regulatory region, and complete genome sequences of JC virus (JCV) from the Guaraní Indians of Argentina. The Tupí‐Guaraní language represents the Equatorial branch of the Amerind language family proposed by Greenberg ([1987] Language in the Americas, Stanford: Stanford University Press). The partial VP1 gene sequences of the Guaraní revealed several variants of strains found in northeast Asia (Japan), as did the Salish. In contrast, the strains in the Navajo largely conformed to the prototype type 2A sequence (MY). Phylogenetic reconstruction with both the neighbor‐joining and maximum parsimony methods utilized three complete Guaraní JCV genome sequences, three genomes from the Salish people, and 27 other complete JCV genomes, including three from the Navajo and three from Japan. Both trees showed that all type 2A JCV strains from the North and South Americans are closely related phylogenetically to strains in present‐day Japan. However, variant sites in the coding regions, the T‐antigen intron, and the regulatory region link the type 2A strains in Amerind groups (Guaraní and Salish), but differentiate them from those in a Na‐Dene‐speaking (Navajo) population. The data suggest separation from a population ancestral to modern Japanese, followed by a second division within the ancestral group that led to Amerind‐ and Na‐Dene‐speaking groups. The data cannot, however, localize the latter split to the Asian mainland (two migrations) or to North America (one migration). Am J Phys Anthropol 118:154–168, 2002. Published 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.