Selection swimming against the genomic tide

Selection swimming against the genomic tide

One of the major issues that confuses people is that the distribution of a trait or gene is often only weakly correlated with overall phylogeny and the rest of the genome.

To give a strange but classic example, the MHC loci are subject to strong balancing selection. This means that novel alleles do not substitute and replace ancestral alleles. Substitution of this sort results in “lineage sorting,” so that when you look at chimpanzees and humans you can see many polymorphic loci where all humans carry one variant and all chimpanzees the other. In contrast at the MHC loci there is frequency-dependent selection for rare variants, so the normal cycling process does not occur. Humans and chimpanzees overlap quite a bit on MHC, and any given human may have a more similar profile to a given chimpanzee than another human.

There are 19,000 human genes. At 3 billion base pairs only about ~100 million are polymorphic on a worldwide scale (using some liberal definitions). There are lots of unique stories to tell here.

A new preprint, Inferring adaptive gene-flow in recent African history, illustrates how certain genes with functional significance may differ from genome-wide background. The authors find that among the Fula (Fulani) people of West Africa there has been introgression from a Eurasian mutation that confers lactase persistence. The area of the genome around this gene is much more Eurasian than the rest of the genome. In contrast, the area around the Duffy allele is much less Eurasian. The variation in this locus is related to malaria resistance. Finally, in other African populations, they found gene flow of MHC variants.

None of this is entirely surprising, though the authors apply novel haplotype-based methods which should have wider utility.

Razib Khan