Y Chromosome Haplotype Reference Database
[1] Two important objectives are pursued: (1) the generation of reliable frequency estimates for Y-STR haplotypes and Y-SNP haplotypes to be used in the quantitative assessment of matches in forensic and kinship cases and (2) the characterization of male lineages to draw conclusions about the origins and history of human populations.
Upon receipt of a submission, the YHRD staff examines the originality, relevance, plausibility and validity of the data and assigns an accession number to the population sample if these criteria are met.
Currently the YHRD database recognizes four separate "metapopulation" structures: national, continental, linguistic/ethnic and phylogenetic affiliation with several categories within.
[8] By analogy, the term metapopulation is used in forensic genetics to describe a set of geographically dispersed populations with shared ancestry and continuing geneflow.
The Metapopulation structure built on basis of "ethnicity/linguistic affiliation" takes to a larger extent the ancestry of sampled individuals into account.
Of course, a Metapopulation concept on basis of "ethnicity" is by no means ideal, fully rational or fully translatable, but simply takes the fact into account that on a global level categories other than "nation" or "geography" far better describe the observed genetic clustering and inhomogeneity of Y chromosome patterns.
It is important to state, that the current Metapopulation structure is an a-priori categorization which needs a continuous evaluation and verification by means of statistical methods to quantify the genetic similarity/dissimilarity between the samples.
[10] Currently the YHRD has seven non-overlapping broadly defined metapopulations: African, Afro-Asiatic, Native American, Australian Aboriginal, East Asian, Eskimo-Aleut, and Eurasian.
The online calculation returns as a result a *.csv table with pairwise FST or ΦST(RST) values plus p-values as a test for significance (10,000 permutations).
The tool can be applied for kinship cases when a relationship between upstream and downstream relatives (e.g. father-son or grandfather-grandson) should be analyzed.
Some of these are recommended by national guidelines, e.g. the augmented counting method with confidence intervals and/or theta subpopulation correction (SWGDAM Interpretation Guidelines for Y-Chromosome STR typing by Forensic Laboratories in the US, 2014) or the Discrete Laplace method (Andersen et al. 2013) as recommended in Germany (Willuweit et al. 2018).
