Genetic study of African populations: polymorphisms of the plasma proteins TF, PL, F13B, and AHSG in populations of Namibia and Mozambique.

Genetic variations of four highly polymorphic serum proteins, TF, PI, F13B, and AHSG, were tested to distinguish one black African and one Khoisan population of southwest Africa. The results show that indeed the systems TF, PI, and AHSG are of high value for anthropological genetics: The allele frequencies for these systems enable clear identification of and distinction between black African and Khoisan populations. The F13B locus, on the other hand, reveals for both the black African and the Khoisan populations specific and unique African variants: a high frequency of F13B2 and the lowest frequency of F13B3 so far worldwide. The new data are compared with results for TF and PI in another black African population of Mozambique, which Rodewald et al. (1988) had studied previously. The dendrogram, based on genetic distance data D and average linkage cluster analysis, shows minimal distance between both black African populations of Namibia and Mozambique and marked distance between those and the Khoisan population of Namibia.