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Background/aims: Approximately four million Africans were taken as slaves to Brazil, where they interbred extensively with Amerindians and Europeans. We have previously shown that while most White Brazilians carry Y chromosomes of European origin, they display high proportions of African and Amerindian mtDNA lineages, because of sex-biased genetic admixture., Methods: We studied the Y chromosome and mtDNA haplogroup structure of 120 Black males from Sao Paulo, Brazil., Results: Only 48% of the Y chromosomes, but 85% of the mtDNA haplogroups were characteristic of sub-Saharan Africa, confirming our previous observation of sexually biased mating. We mined literature data for mtDNA and Y chromosome haplogroup frequencies for African native populations from regions involved in Atlantic Slave Trade. Principal Components Analysis and Bayesian analysis of population structure revealed no genetic differentiation of Y chromosome marker frequencies between the African regions. However, mtDNA examination unraveled considerable genetic structure, with three clusters at Central-West Africa, West Africa and Southeast Africa. A hypothesis is proposed to explain this structure., Conclusion: Using these mtDNA data we could obtain for the first time an estimate of the relative ancestral contribution of Central-West (0.445), West (0.431) and Southeast Africa (0.123) to African Brazilians from Sao Paulo. These estimates are consistent with historical information., (Copyright 2008 S. Karger AG, Basel.)

This work was undertaken to ascertain to what degree the physical appearance of a Brazilian individual was predictive of genomic African ancestry. Using a panel of 10 population-specific alleles, we assigned to each person an African ancestry index (AAI). The procedure was able to tell apart, with no overlaps, 20 males from northern Portugal from 20 males from São Tomé Island on the west coast of Africa. We also tested 10 Brazilian Amerindians and observed that their AAI values fell in the same range as the Europeans. Finally, we studied two different Brazilian population samples. The first consisted of 173 individuals from a rural Southeastern community, clinically classified according to their Color (white, black, or intermediate) with a multivariate evaluation based on skin pigmentation in the medial part of the arm, hair color and texture, and the shape of the nose and lips. In contrast to the clear-cut results with the African and European samples, our results showed large variances and extensive overlaps among the three Color categories. We next embarked on a study of 200 unrelated Brazilian white males who originated from cosmopolitan centers of the four major geographic regions of the country. The results showed AAI values intermediate between Europeans and Africans, even in southern Brazil, a region predominantly peopled by European immigrants. Our data suggest that in Brazil, at an individual level, color, as determined by physical evaluation, is a poor predictor of genomic African ancestry, estimated by molecular markers.