Revealing the recent demographic history of Europe via haplotype sharing in the UK Biobank

Recent haplotype sharing analyses in specific European populations have revealed fine-scale genetic differentiation that echoes history. An equivalent understanding across the whole European continent would place these insights into a wider context and extend understanding to underdescribed regions. Here, we leverage haplotype data from 5,500 European-ancestry individuals from the UK Biobank (UKBB) in a methodological approach to update and expand the European genetic landscape, extending coverage to regions in the southeast of Europe, identifying communities of high haplotype sharing that may be of interest to genetic mapping, such as Malta. Together, our results highlight European communities with diverse ancestries sampled within the UKBB and demonstrate the potential for insights to be made with other non-European ancestry communities using this dataset.