Mitochondrial DNA sequence diversity in Kedayan population

Abstract

The Kedayan is an indigenous population in Borneo who speak the Austronesian language, and majority of them live in Sabah and Sarawak on the Malaysian side of the island. In this study, we screened for sequence diversity in the noncoding region of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from 48 unrelated and unadmixed Kedayan individuals living in Sabah and Sarawak. The probability of two randomly selected individuals from the population having identical mtDNA types is low (0.61%) with a random match probability and haplotype diversity of 0.0365 and 0.9840, respectively. The B4a1a was the most frequently detected mtDNA haplogroup in the Kedayan (25%). This B4a1a haplotype is characterized by polymorphisms at nucleotide positions 16217, 16247, and 16261, and it is widely distributed in other Austronesian natives in Southeast Asia, Melanesia and Polynesia. The newly developed mtDNA population data of the Kedayan people will provide valuable resource for forensic identification purposes and understanding human migration history in the region.