Pardo Seco, Jacobo JoséHeinz, Tanja MariaTaboada Echalar, PatriciaMartinón Torres, FedericoSalas Ellacuriaga, Antonio2017-10-202017-10-202016-03-09Pardo-Seco, Jacobo, Tanja Heinz, Patricia Taboada-Echalar, Federico Martinón-Torres, and Antonio Salas. 2016. "Mapping The Genomic Mosaic Of Two ‘Afro-Bolivians’ From The Isolated Yungas Valleys". BMC Genomics 17 (1). doi:10.1186/s12864-016-2520-x1471-2164http://hdl.handle.net/10347/15915Background: Unraveling the ancestry of ‘Afro-American’ communities is hampered by the complex demographic processes that took place during the Transatlantic Slave Trade (TAST) and the (post-)colonization periods. ‘AfroBolivians’ from the subtropical Yungas valleys constitute small and isolated communities that live surrounded by the predominant Native American community of Bolivia. By genotyping >580,000 SNPs in two ‘Afro-Bolivians’, and comparing these genomic profiles with data compiled from more than 57 African groups and other reference ancestral populations (n = 1,161 in total), we aimed to disentangle the complex admixture processes undergone by ‘Afro-Bolivians’. Results: The data indicate that these two genomes constitute a complex mosaic of ancestries that is approximately 80 % of recent African origin; the remaining ~20 % being European and Native American. West-Central Africa contributed most of the African ancestry to ‘Afro-Bolivians’, and this component is related to populations living along the Atlantic coast (i.e. Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria). Using tract length distribution of genomic segments attributable to distinct ancestries, we could date the time of admixture in about 400 years ago. This time coincides with the maximum importation of slaves to Bolivia to compensate the diminishing indigenous labor force needed for the development of the National Mint of Potosí. Conclusions: Overall, the data indicate that the genome of ‘Afro-Bolivians’ was shaped by a complex process of admixture occurring in America among individuals originating in different West-Central African populations; their genomic mosaics received additional contributions of Europeans and local Native Americans (e.g. Aymaras)eng© 2016 Pardo-Seco et al. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise statedTransatlantic slave tradeAfro-BoliviansAncestryGenomeSNPsjournal article10.1186/s12864-016-2520-xopen access