2025 / 06

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DOI: 10.24075/brsmu.2025.062
Copyright: © 2025 by the authors. Licensee: Pirogov University.
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY).

ORIGINAL RESEARCH

Genetic portraits of volga–Oka region in the context of the Central Russia’s gene pool (Y-SNP polymorphism)

Ponomarev GYu1 , Shlykov AG1 , Gorin IO1 , Voronina MM1 , Potanina AYu1 , Petrov VA1 , Koshel SM2 , Adamov DS1 , Balanovska EV1
About authors

1 Research Centre for Medical Genetics, Moscow, Russia

2 Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia

Correspondence should be addressed: Georgy Yu. Ponomarev
Moskvorechye, 1, 115522, Moscow, Russia; moc.liamg@009i62ts

About paper

Funding: the study was supported by the RSF grant No. 25-28-01594.

Acknowledgements: the authors would like to thank all participants of the expedition survey, who provided their biological samples for the study, to Administration and employees of the Ministry of Healthcare of the Ryazan Region and Republic of Mordovia for institutional support and assistance in conducting expeditions, as well as to Biobank of North Eurasia for access to DNA collections.

Author contribution: Ponomarev GYu — genotyping and Y-SNP marker analysis, study design; Shlykov AG — manager of the expedition survey of the gene pool of the Ryazan Region and Mordovia; Ponomarev GYu, Voronina MM, Petrov VA — expedition members, questionnaire survey data analysis; Adamov DS, Potanina AYu, Gorin IO — statistical analysis; Koshel SM — cartographic analysis; Adamov DS, Balanovska EV — study design and manuscript writing.

Compliance with ethical standards: the study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Research Centre for Medical Genetics (protocol No. 1 dated 29 June 2020). The data were acquired after obtaining the written informed consent from the assessed individuals and anonymised.

Received: 2025-10-16 Accepted: 2025-11-22 Published online: 2025-12-01
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Fig. 1. Genetic portraits of populations of the Volga–Oka region (within the borders of the Ryazan Region and Mordovia). The data on the conditionally “Slavic” haplogroups R1a-CTS1211, R1a-M458, I2a-P37.2 and the conditionally “Uralic haplogroups N3a1, N3a3, N3a4 are provided for all populations; the set of other haplogroups is referred to as “Other”
Fig. 2. Position of populations of European Russia in the genetic space based on the pairwise analysis of genetic distances (stress coefficient = 0.16; alienation coefficient = 0.17)
Fig. 3. Position of populations of the Slavic and Ural-Volga clusters relative to each other on the pairwise analysis of genetic distances (stress coefficient = 0.09; alienation coefficient = 0.13)
Fig. 4. Geographic distribution and frequencies of the major haplogroups of the indigenous population of European Russia: haplogroup R1a-CTS1211 (А); haplogroup R1a-M458 (B); haplogroup I-P37 (C); haplogroup N3a1 (D); haplogroup N3a3 (E); haplogroup N3a4 (F). Shades of green reflect the minimum haplogroup frequency; shades of yellow — medium frequencies; orange and red — maximum frequencies
Fig. 5. Maps of Nei's genetic distances from the studied populations of the Volga–Oka region: from the total sample of Russian populations of the Ryazan Region (А); from populations of Erzya (B); from populations of Moksha (C); from populations of Shoksha (D). Shades of green reflect the minimum genetic distances (maximum similarity of gene pools); shades of purple and blue — medium genetic distances; shades of violet — maximum genetic distances (considerable differences between gene pools)
Table. Frequencies of Y-chromosome haplogroups (%) in the indigenous population of the Ryazan Region and Mordovia
Note: The red background marks the values corresponding to the 5% polymorphism criterion. Haplogroups are presented in the descending order of their frequencies in the gene pool of the Volga–Oka region. * Shoksha — is not a generally accepted term for the population of Erzya of the Tengushevsky district in northwestern Mordovia