The geographic mosaic of Ecuadorian Y-chromosome ancestry.

Ecuadorians originated from a complex mixture of Native American indigenous people with Europeans and Africans. We analyzed Y-chromosome STRs (Y-STRs) in a sample of 415 Ecuadorians (145 using the AmpFlSTR Yfiler™ system [Life Technologies, USA] and 270 using the PowerPlexY23 system [Promega Corp., USA]; hereafter Yfiler and PPY23, respectively) representing three main ecological continental regions of the country, namely Amazon rainforest, Andes, and Pacific coast.