Background. The aim of this work is to evaluate appropriateness of three Fst, Rst and Sst statistics used to calculate genetic distances between populations for STR data. Moreover, to determine if there is statistically significant correlation of genetic and geographic distances between six ethno- linguistic groups of Lithuania.
Material and methods. Participants were 293 Lithuanian individuals rep re senting six eth no- lin guis tic groups of Lithuania. Haplotypes for all participants were determined using commercial Applied Biosystems AmpFlSTR® Yfiler™ kit. Arlequin 3.5 program was used to calculate Fst, Rst and Sst genetic distances. Spearman and Kendall correlation coefficients and assessment of statistical significance performed using Mann-Whit- ney-Wilcoxon test calculated by IBM SPSS Statistics 20 program.
Results. Statistically significant differences of Fst genetic distances were determined between eight out of 136 possible pairs of 17 cities. Calculation of Rst and Sst genetic distances showed only 13 out of 136 pairs that differ not statistically significantly. Genetic difference only between Southern Aukštaičiai and Northern Žemaičiai groups was not statistically significant (p=0.344). Genetic and geographic distances differences statistically significant between Western Aukštaičių and Northern Žemaičių also between Western and Eastern Aukštaičių groups but do not correlate. Other ethno-linguistic group pairs showed statistically significant differences only for genetic or geographic distances. Statistically significant correlation between genetic and geographic distances of all 15 possible pairs of six ethno-linguistic groups of Lithuania was not observed.
Conclusions. Rst and Sst statistics are more suitable than FST to cal- cu late ge netic dis tances be tween groups using STR data as more statistically significant values are obtained. Relatively small geographic area of Lithuania, geographic distances between groups and small sample size may have influenced results.
Keywords: genetic distance, geographic distance, Y chromosome, STR markers, population of Lithuania