Evolutionary fitness & nutrition
Russ Roberts recently had a discussion on Econtalk with Arthur de Vany. A lot of it covered baseball and social science, but he also spent a lot of time on “evolutionary fitness” (see the website at the link). I agree with a lot of what he had to say, but felt that some of his […]
Helicobacter pylori strains among Iranians
Ethnic and Geographic Differentiation of Helicobacter pylori within Iran:
The bacterium Helicobacter pylori colonizes the human stomach, with individual infections persisting for decades. The spread of the bacterium has been shown to reflect both ancient and recent human migrations. We have sequenced housekeeping genes from H. pylori isolated from 147 Iranians with well-characterized geographical and ethnic […]
Heterozygote advantage in resistance to tuberculosis
The lta4h Locus Modulates Susceptibility to Mycobacterial Infection in Zebrafish and Humans:
Exposure to Mycobacterium tuberculosis produces varied early outcomes, ranging from resistance to infection to progressive disease. Here we report results from a forward genetic screen in zebrafish larvae that identify multiple mutant classes with distinct patterns of innate susceptibility to Mycobacterium marinum. A hypersusceptible […]
Creative destruction in the personal genomics industry?
I’m hearing about rumblings at 23andMe, and not in a good way. The company made a big splash a few years ago, and came highly recommended by friends (e.g., “They know their science, and have a bottomless pool of money”). This story at BNET got my attention though, and confirmed what many have been […]
Eating like your ancestors
The ideas of gene-culture coevolution have percolated all the way to the foodie-sphere, over at Epi-Log at Epicurious, The Health Trend of the Future: The Ethnic-Group Diet?:
So, maybe at some point in the future, a visit to the doctor will involve a full genetic workup followed by a prescribed diet tailored to our individual makeup. […]
Alcoholism, genes, and genetic background
PNAS has a new study out on the “modest” association between GABRA2 and “alcohol dependence.” The odds ratios pretty weak. But what struck me is that the populations they looked at was mostly European and African American. I wonder why these research programs just don’t focus on Native Ameicans; who are operationally an admixed population […]
The cultural animal as an evolving animal
Nicholas Wade has an article in The New York Times, Human Culture, an Evolutionary Force. One point to highlight:
By this criterion, many of the genes under selection seem to be responding to conventional pressures. Some are involved in the immune system, and presumably became more common because of the protection they provided against disease. Genes […]
Armenian genetics
Armenian genes: Scientist in Yerevan launches a project to reveal genetic history of the nation. The description of the science in the piece is very garbled. But, it would be nice to elucidate the genetics of Armenians in more detail. Their language, like Greek and Albanian, is a singleton in the Indo-European family tree. Additionally, […]
Small genetic effects do not preclude drug development
Daniel MacArthur points me to a Newsweek article on the bankruptcy of Decode Genetics. The author describes (one of) Decode’s problems like this:The genetics of illness turned out to be more complex than researchers expected. At deCODE and elsewhere, t…
Homo erectus and EDAR?
In Why Evolution is True, Jerry Coyne has the following parenthetical aside about population variation in morphology in H. erectus:(H. erectus from China…had shovel-shaped incisor teeth not found in other populations) This stopped me dead in my track…
“Synthetic associations” and sickle cell anemia
Last week, I made a silly error in describing a problem in the sickle cell anemia example given by Dickson et al. (2010) as an empirical example of the phenomenon they call “synthetic association”. So allow me to take a mulligan, and re-try this:The au…
A bold prediction: “synthetic associations” are not a panacea
There’s a bit of press surrounding the interesting result from David Goldstein’s group that, in certain situations, a number of “rare” (defined as an allele frequency less than 5% [1]) variants influencing a trait can lead to an association signal at “…
How Chinese relate to each other and the Japanese
Last month I pointed to a paper on Chinese population structure, Genomic Dissection of Population Substructure of Han Chinese and Its Implication in Association Studies. One to note was that the average FST differentiation Han populations was on the or…
PRDM9 and the evolution of recombination hotspots
This week in Science, three papers report that the product of the gene PRDM9 is an important determinant of where recombination occurs in the genome during meiosis. Though this may sound like something of an esoteric discovery, it’s actually pretty rem…
Mutation and selection in stickleback evolution
Understanding the precise molecular mechanisms underlying changes in animal morphology is a tricky problem–usually two species which have diverged morphologically (say, mice and humans) are now so unrelated as to make genetic study exceedingly difficu…
The diversity of the east
Just a weird random thought. In the early 20th century the Ainu of Japan were considered by many physical anthropologists a branch of the white race. This fit in nicely with the historical fantasy of the period which often featured “Lost Races,” with a…
Selection & African Americans
I already posted on the new paper on African American Genetics. I noticed that Frank Sweet says:It is interesting that the 18 percent mean of Euro DNA markers in A-As has been holding steady for about 8 years now, having replaced the prior estimate of …
Brain size & microcephaly genes
Microcephaly Genes Associated With Human Brain Size:Highly significant associations were found between cortical surface area and polymorphisms in possible regulatory regions near the gene CDK5RAP2. This gene codes for a protein involved in cell-cycle r…
Brain size & microcephaly genes
Microcephaly Genes Associated With Human Brain Size:Highly significant associations were found between cortical surface area and polymorphisms in possible regulatory regions near the gene CDK5RAP2. This gene codes for a protein involved in cell-cycle r…