Uniparental markers in Italy reveal a sex-biased genetic structure and different historical strata

University of Adelaide Genographic Consortium contributers: Christina J. Adler, Alan Cooper, Clio S. I. Der Sarkissian, Wolfgang Haak.Located in the center of the Mediterranean landscape and with an extensive coastal line, the territory of what is today Italy has played an important role in the history of human settlements and movements of Southern Europe and the Mediterranean Basin. Populated since Paleolithic times, the complexity of human movements during the Neolithic, the Metal Ages and the most recent history of the two last millennia (involving the overlapping of different cultural and demic strata) has shaped the pattern of the modern Italian genetic structure. With the aim of disentangling this pattern and understanding which processes more importantly shaped the distribution of diversity, we have analyzed the uniparentally-inherited markers in ~900 individuals from an extensive sampling across the Italian peninsula, Sardinia and Sicily. Spatial PCAs and DAPCs revealed a sex-biased pattern indicating different demographic histories for males and females. Besides the genetic outlier position of Sardinians, a North West–South East Y-chromosome structure is found in continental Italy. Such structure is in agreement with recent archeological syntheses indicating two independent and parallel processes of Neolithisation. In addition, date estimates pinpoint the importance of the cultural and demographic events during the late Neolithic and Metal Ages. On the other hand, mitochondrial diversity is distributed more homogeneously in agreement with older population events that might be related to the presence of an Italian Refugium during the last glacial period in Europe.Alessio Boattini, Begoña Martinez-Cruz, Stefania Sarno, Christine Harmant, Antonella Useli, Paula Sanz, Daniele Yang-Yao, Jeremy Manry, Graziella Ciani, Donata Luiselli, Lluis Quintana- Murci, David Comas, Davide Pettener, the Genographic Consortiu

Motor and non-motor error and the influence of error magnitude on brain activity

It has been shown that frontal cortical areas increase their activity during error perception and error processing. However, it is not yet clear whether perception of motor errors is processed in the same frontal areas as perception of errors in cognitive tasks. It is also unclear whether brain activity level is influenced by the magnitude of error. For this purpose, we conducted a study in which subjects were confronted with motor and non-motor errors, and had them perform a sensorimotor transformation task in which they were likely to commit motor errors of different magnitudes (internal errors). In addition to the internally committed motor errors, non-motor errors (external errors) were added to the feedback in some trials. We found that activity in the anterior insula, inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), cerebellum, precuneus, and posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC) correlated positively with the magnitude of external errors. The middle frontal gyrus (MFG) and the pMFC cortex correlated positively with the magnitude of the total error fed back to subjects (internal plus external). No significant positive correlation between internal error and brain activity could be detected. These results indicate that motor errors have a differential effect on brain activity compared with non-motor errors