María Pino-Yanes, Almudena Corrales, Santiago Basaldúa, Alexis Hernández, Luisa Guerra, Jesús Villar, Carlos Flores

Despite the limited genetic heterogeneity of Spanish populations, substantial evidences support that historical African influences have not affected them uniformly. Accounting for such population differences might be essential to reduce spurious results in association studies of genetic factors with disease. Using ancestry informative markers (AIMs), we aimed to measure the African influences in Spanish populations and to explore whether these might introduce statistical bias in population-based association studies.