A different way to examine the patterns of genetic variation in Iceland is through summary statistics such as FST, which reflects the proportion of the total genetic variation found in two populations that is explained by their division into separate populations [23],[16] (see Materials and Methods). F ST values were computed for each pair of Icelandic regions, yielding an average of 0.0026 (Table 2). Both Figure 2A and Table 2 show that region 7 and particularly region 9 show the greatest divergence from the other regions, as well as the lowest heterozygosity, which suggests that these regions have been more influenced by genetic drift than the others. This finding is consistent with the small historical population sizes of these regions [24].
