116 Section MOLECULAR ANTHROPOLOGY – NEW ADVANCES GENE POOL OF THE SOUTHWEST ASIA: REFLECTION OF GEOGRAPHICAL RELIEF AND LINGUISTIC STRATIFICATION Chukhryaeva Marina1,2 Agdzhoyan Anastasiya2 , Dibirova Khadizhat1,2 , Yepiskoposyan Levon3 , Teuchezh Irina1,2 , Kuznetsova Marina1,2 , Pocheshkhova Elvira4 1Research Centre for Medical Genetics, Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, Moscow, Russia 2Vavilov Institute of General Genetics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia 3Institute of Molecular Biology NAS AR, Yerevan, Armenia 4Kuban State Medical University, Federal Agency of Public Health and Social Development, Krasnodar, Russia Southwest Asia despite the predominance of mountainous and arid landscapes was not only the birthplace of the ancient states – according to the Anatolian hypothesis it was the homeland of the IndoEuropean language family. <...> How similar are the gene pools of the Indo-European speaking populations of Southwest Asia to those who speak Semitic and Turkic languages? <...> Is the geographical landscape a factor which shaped the genetic landscape? <...> To answer these questions, we studied the Y-chromosomal gene pool of the Southwest Asia for published data (over 4000 individuals) and our new data on fi ve Armenian populations, covering the area of historic Armenia (436 individuals). <...> The multidimensional scaling (MDS) plot revealed two genetically different groups of the populations in Southwest Asia. <...> The fi rst group included mountain-dwelling populations: Turks, Armenians and different populations from Iran. <...> The second group included populations of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Arabian Peninsula, and thus could be called the “plain” group. <...> The hierarchical analysis of the inter-population variability (AMOVA) confi rms this pattern. <...> Genetic differences between “highland” and “plain” groups of populations are nine times higher than the differentiation obtained by grouping populations by standard geographic parameters like latitude and longitude. <...> Armenians formed a subcluster within the “highland” group of populations on the MDS plot. <...> Note, that Georgians (geographical neighbors of Armenians) fall into another (the Caucasus) cluster together with the Abkhazians and the majority of the populations of the North Caucasus. <...> The cartographic analysis confi rmed that North Caucasus and Georgian populations are genetically distant from populations of “highland” cluster. <...> Analysis of genetic differentiation of Southwest Asian populations under the linguistic stratifi cation revealed signifi cant <...>