Hyderabad: Indian population is an
admixture of two ancestral populations, said a new scientific
research.
The research, claimed to be "the first and largest-ever
genome-scale analysis of diverse Indian groups", is done by
scientists from Hyderabad-based Centre for Cellular and
Molecular Biology (CCMB) in collaboration with Harvard Medical
School, Harvard School of Public Health and the Broad
Institute of Harvard and MIT, USA.
"The implication of this study is that India is not one
population and we are a nation of multiple populations," Lalji
Singh, a research team member, told a press conference today.
Barring the Andamanese, the present Indian population is
a mixture of Ancestral North Indian (ANI) and Ancestral South
Indian (ASI), the former CCMB director said.
The genomic analyses revealed two ancestral populations--
ANI and ASI. There were 4,635 well-defined populations in
India, including 532 tribes and 72 primitive tribes, he said.
Results of the research were published in the latest
issue of the international science journal 'Nature'.
Bureau Report
First Published: Thursday, September 24, 2009, 19:18