The genetic legacy of African Americans from Catoctin Furnace

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Harney, Eadaoin; Micheletti, Steven S.; Bruwelheide, Karin A.; Freyman, William; Bryc, Katarzyna; Akbari, Ali; Jewett, Ethan; Comer, Elizabeth; Gates Jr, Henry Louis; Heywood, Linda; Thornton, John; Curry, Roslyn; Esselmann, Samantha Ancona G.; Barca, Kathryn; Sedig, Jakob; Sirak, Kendra; Olalde, Inigo; Adamski, Nicole; Bernardos, Rebecca; Broomandkhoshbacht, Nasreen; Ferry, Matthew; Qiu, Lijun; Stewardson, Kristin; Workman, J. Noah; Zalzala, Fatma; Mallick, Shop; Micco, Adam; Mah, Matthew; Zhang, Zhao; Rohland, Nadin W.; Mountain, Joanna; Owsley, Douglas; Reich, David
• 署名单位: 23andMe, Inc.; Harvard University; Smithsonian Institution; Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History; Harvard University; Harvard Medical School; Harvard University; Boston University; University of Basque Country; Basque Foundation for Science; Harvard University; Harvard Medical School; Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Harvard University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Broad Institute
• 刊物名称: SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0036-11683
• DOI: 10.1126/science.ade4995
• 发表日期: 2023-08-04
• 页码: 500-+
• 关键词: genome diversity project; mitochondrial-dna; ancient dna; slave-trade; ancestry; origin; selection; HISTORY; contamination; neanderthal

摘要

INTRODUCTION: Genetic analysis of historical individuals has the potential to help restore knowledge of peoplewhose storieswere omitted fromwritten records. During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Catoctin Furnace in Maryland relied on a workforce of enslaved individuals to operate the iron furnace and carry out domestic and agricultural tasks. Despite the role that Catoctin Furnace played in early US history (including supplying munitions during theRevolutionaryWar), relatively little is known about the African Americans who labored there or their descendants compared with the furnace's later, predominantly white workforce. RATIONALE: We produced genome-wide data for 27 individuals buried in the Catoctin Furnace African American Cemetery and compared them to similar to 9.3 million consenting research participants genotyped by 23andMe, Inc., to address the following questions: (i) How were the Catoctin individuals related to each other? (ii) What were the sources of their African and European ancestry? (iii) Where in the US do their genetic relatives live today, including their direct descendants? (iv) What can their genomes reveal about their health? RESULTS: We identified five genetic families, consisting of biological mothers, children, and siblings, among the Catoctin individuals. In most cases, biological family members were buried in close proximity. All but one of the Catoctin individuals had primarilyAfrican ancestry, with variable amounts of European ancestry. To learn more about their ancestry, we developed an approach to detect identical-by-descent segments of the genome shared between the Catoctin individuals and 23andMe research participants. Identical-by-descent segments of DNA are shared by two or more people because they have been inherited from a recent common ancestor. We identified 41,799 close and distant relatives of the Catoctin individuals among 23andMe research participants. Within Africa, we found the highest rates of genetic sharing between Catoctin individuals and research participants who self-identified as belonging to the Wolof or Kongo ethnolinguistic groups. Within Europe, we observed the highest rates of genetic sharingwith research participants that have ties to Great Britain and Ireland. Within the US, participants from the South showed elevated rates of sharing, largely reflecting distant connections to 23andMe research participants with sub-Saharan African ancestry (possibly tracing back to shared common ancestors in Africa). When we considered genetic relatives who share the most identicalDNAwith the Catoctin individuals, we observed the highest rates of sharing in Maryland, suggesting that at least some descendants stayed in the region after the furnace's transition away from enslaved and paid African American labor. CONCLUSION: These results demonstrate the power of joint analysis of DNA from historical individuals and the extremely large datasets generated through direct-to-consumer ancestry testing, and they serve as amodel for obtaining direct insights into the genome-wide genetic ancestry of enslaved people in the historicalUS.