evolutionary genetics
dgmacarthur | March 24, 2009Pickrell, J., Coop, G., Novembre, J., Kudaravalli, S., Li, J., Absher, D., Srinivasan, B., Barsh, G., Myers, R., Feldman, M., & Pritchard, J. (2009). Signals of recent positive selection in a worldwide sample of human populations Genome Research DOI: 10.1101/gr.087577.108I pointed yesterday to a new paper in Genome Research taking a genome-wide look at the signatures of recent natural selection in a worldwide sample of humans.
I promised a more thorough analysis of this paper today, but I see Razib at Gene Expression has already done a fine job of that. Razib's post covers the bulk of the…
dgmacarthur | March 23, 2009I'll hopefully have more time to write about this tomorrow, but for now I'll simply suggest that you go and read the free full text PDF of this advance online manuscript in Genome Research.
This is the most important recent paper in the field of human evolutionary genetics - a thorough and careful analysis of the signatures of positive natural selection left in our genome by the last 10-40,000 years of adaptation, using a population sample that is far broader than those used in previous studies (53 populations rather than 4). I covered some of the approaches used in the paper in this post on…
dgmacarthur | February 5, 2009Just a quick pointer to a new paper in American Journal of Human Genetics with my office-mate Bryndis Yngvadottir as lead author, which I see has already received some well-deserved coverage from ScienceDaily and GenomeWeb Daily News. The paper shows that specific types of genetic variants that inactivate genes - called nonsense SNPs - are surprisingly common in the human population.
Here's the abstract:
Nonsense SNPs introduce premature termination codons into genes and can
result in the absence of a gene product or in a truncated and
potentially harmful protein, so they are often considered…
dgmacarthur | January 16, 2009Razib has an excellent discussion of a brand new paper in PLoS Genetics, which uses DNA samples from medieval Icelandic skeletons to explore the genetic history of the Icelandic population.
This population is of course of great interest to human geneticists: the Icelandic company deCODE (the home of over half the authors on this paper) has used its exclusive access to the DNA and genealogical and health records of Icelanders to publish vast numbers of studies on the genetic basis of human disease and other complex traits. In addition, deCODE's consumer genetics division deCODEme provides one…
dgmacarthur | January 9, 2009T. Hofer, N. Ray, D. Wegmann, L. Excoffier (2009). Large allele frequency differences between human continental groups are more likely to have occurred by drift during range expansions than by selection Annals of Human Genetics, 73 (1), 95-108 DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-1809.2008.00489.x
I've just been reading over an article from late last year in the Annals of Human Genetics:
In this study, we examined 772 STRs, 210 diallelic indels, and 2834 SNPs typed in 53 human populations worldwide under the HGDP-CEPH Diversity Panel to determine to which extent allele frequency differs among four regions (…