Genetic formation of Sui populations in southwest China

The Sui people living in Guizhou province have a unique ethnic culture and population history due to their long-time isolation from other populations. To investigate the genetic structure of Sui populations in different regions of Guizhou, we genotyped 89 individuals from 4 Sui populations using genome-wide SNP arrays. We analyzed the data using principal component analysis (PCA), ADMIXTURE analysis, f-statistics, qpWave/qpAdm, TreeMix analysis, fineSTRUCTURE, and GLOBETROTTER. We found that Sui populations in Guizhou were genetically homogeneous and they had a close genetic affinity with Tai-Kadai-speaking populations, Hmong-Mien-speaking Hmong, as well as some ancient populations from southern China. The Sui populations could be modeled as an admixture of 28.9%-33.8% of Yellow River Basin farmer-related ancestry and 66.2%-71.1% of Southeast Asian-related ancestry, indicating that the southward expansion of northern East Asian-related ancestry influenced the formation of the Tai-Kadai-speaking Sui people. Future publications of more ancient genomics in southern China could effectively provide further insight into the demographic history and population structure of the Sui people