Patterns of natural selection in Central Asian populations

The genetic structure of a modern population contains a lot of information about its genetic history, so it carries the signs of migrations, admixtures, bottlenecks, drifts and natural selection. By comparing two or more populations it’s possible to determine some key parameters like genetic distance (FST) that are evidence of the mentioned events in the past. The main focus of this thesis is to detect signs of natural selection in Central Asian populations considering some of the genes involved in the trait “skin pigmentation". Using the software Plink and Rstudio, a confrontation between African, Central South Asia and European populations has been performed, both at a genomic and genetic level. The results of this comparison consist in genomic and in genetic FST, which values are compared to determine whether a gene has been under selection or not. The further a gene is from what is expected from a population, the higher the probability that said gene has been under natural selection.