Ricerc@Sapienza

One of the most striking structural features of the male specific region of the human Y
chromosome (MSY) is the presence, within the ampliconic sequences, of eight massive
palindromes (P1-P8). Each palindrome is composed of two large inverted repeats (arms)
separated by a small “spacer” sequence at the centre. These elements, ranging from 30 kb
to 2.9 Mb, contain many testis-specific genes and typically exhibit > 99.9% intra-palindromic

Early Holocene was characterised by a worldwide climatic amelioration (12-5 kya), which led to the formation of the Green Sahara in Africa. In a previous project, in order to understand the effects of this fertile environment in the peopling of Africa, we deep-sequenced ~ 3.3 Mb in 104 Y chromosomes belonging to four trans-Saharan haplogroups and identified 5,966 mutations.