Category: Genomics
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Ashkenazi Jews are not inbred
Jews, and Ashkenazi Jews in particular, are very genetically distinctive. A short and sweet way to think about this population is that they’re a moderately recent admixture between a Middle Eastern population, and Western Europeans, which has bee…
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Inbred shorter people
Evidence of Inbreeding Depression on Human Height, a paper with over 1,000 authors! (I exaggerate) It’s interesting because it seems to establish that inbreeding does have a deleterious effect on traits whose genetic architecture is presumably po…
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The first, second, and third nations
By now you’ve probably read about the paper which reports that there seem to have been three waves of humans migrating into the New World prior to the arrival of Europeans. A major aspect of this result is that it does not emerge out of a vacuum,…
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Creative bacterial destruction
To the left is a panel from a new paper in PLoS Genetics, Selection-Driven Gene Loss in Bacteria. The y-axis is selection, so above 0 represents a positive selection coefficient, and below a negative one. The lineages above the x-axis then are more fit…
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Two pulses of white admixture in American slaves?
I noticed today an interesting paper in Genetics by Simon Gravel, Population Genetics Models of Local Ancestry. As indicated by the title this is a general paper where the method is the main course. But, there was an interesting empirical result which …
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The rise of the rare variant
A few people have mentioned to me a couple of new papers in Science are out on rare variants. They’re summed up in a short review article. I suspect this is going to be a big deal for some time. For humans we are coming to toward the end of the …
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Genetics for the 21st century
Rosie Redfield has an opinion piece out in PLoS Biology on refashioning genetics education for the 21st century, “Why Do We Have to Learn This Stuff?”—A New Genetics for 21st Century Students: …Genetic analysis used to be the most powerful …
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Genetics for the 21st century
Rosie Redfield has an opinion piece out in PLoS Biology on refashioning genetics education for the 21st century, “Why Do We Have to Learn This Stuff?”—A New Genetics for 21st Century Students: …Genetic analysis used to be the most powerful …
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Sleeping like a Neandertal
Forgot to highlight one of the coolest abstracts from SMBE 2012, A genomewide map of Neandertal ancestry in modern humans: 2. The map allows us to identify Neandertal alleles that have been the target of selection since introgression. We identified ove…
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Sleeping like a Neandertal
Forgot to highlight one of the coolest abstracts from SMBE 2012, A genomewide map of Neandertal ancestry in modern humans: 2. The map allows us to identify Neandertal alleles that have been the target of selection since introgression. We identified ove…
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SMBE 2012
Dienekes has summaries up of human-related abstracts of Society for Molecular Biology & Evolution 2012. 1) Remember these are not papers, and some of the abstracts may never become papers, at least in recognizable form 2) Speaking of which, Estim…
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Not out of Sheba
Liya Kebede, Credit There is a new paper, Ethiopian Genetic Diversity Reveals Linguistic Stratification and Complex Influences on the Ethiopian Gene Pool, which is being sensationalized in the media. For example, the BBC headline: ‘DNA clues to …
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The current bias in genealogical databases
As a follow up to my post below on the thick coverage of European information in genealogical and genomic databases, here are the “Ancestry Finder” matches from 23andMe for my daughter using the default settings: If I increase sensitivity …
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Case closed: blonde Melanesians understood
As a small child perusing old physical anthropology books I would occasionally stumble upon images of people of Oceanian stock with light hair color. I would wonder: is this a biological or cultural feature? In other words, were people bleaching their …
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Her identity by descent made flesh
As I have indicated before, my daughter has a family tree where everyone out to 0.25 coefficient of relatedness has been genotyped by 23andMe. This is convenient in many ways. Before, relatedness was a theory. Now relatedness can be ascertained on the …
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The genome is a structure, not just an abstraction
Here’s a quick follow-up on the study which purported to illustrate the shortcomings in genomic risks prediction, and received major media coverage: Neil Risch, PhD, a leading expert in statistical genetics and the director of the UCSF Institute …
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Common variant for “IQ gene”?
A few people have forwarded me this paper, Identification of common variants associated with human hippocampal and intracranial volumes: …Whereas many brain imaging phenotypes are highly heritable…identifying and replicating genetic influen…
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Nature Precedings closes up shop
Here’s the announcement: As of April 3rd 2012, we will cease to accept submissions to Nature Precedings. Nature Precedings will then be archived, and the archive will be maintained by NPG, while all hosted content will remain freely accessible to…
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Neanderthals came in all colors
There’s a report in Science about a new short paper about Neandertal pigmentation genetics. The context is this. First, in 2007 an ingenuous paper was published which inferred that it may be that Neandertals had red hair, at least based on an N = 2 from two divergent locations. The new study looks at three…
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The Indonesian cline
Dienekes has touched upon it in detail, so I don’t have much to add. Except for two points: 1) The ancestry cline here is not due to isolation-by-distance, but the expansion of the Austronesian population rather precipitously ~4,000 years ago. As Dienekes observed this was rather clear by non-genetic means; this is just icing on…