Raging against the population genetics machine
An interesting readable review in PLoS Genetics taking on population genetics, Frail Hypotheses in Evolutionary Biology:
In conclusion, I return to Michael Lynch’s challenging questions about blind spots and bad wheels in evolutionary biology which motivated this review…Concerning blind spots I have pointed out some limitations of current population genetics. There is too much emphasis on […]
Beautiful butterflies & localized adaptation
Two new papers are out in PLoS Genetics which make inferences about adaptation using butterfly species which exhibit Mullerian mimicry. I’ll give the author summaries instead of the abstracts.Genomic Hotspots for Adaptation: The Population Genetics of …
Lactase persistance in India
Frequency of lactose malabsorption among healthy southern and northern Indian populations by genetic analysis and lactose hydrogen breath and tolerance tests:Volunteers from southern and northern India were comparable in age and sex. The LTT result was…
The few and the many
John Hawks has some commentary on a Nicholas Wade article which previews a new paper on long term effective population size in humans, soon to be out in PNAS (Wade’s piece states that it’ll be out tomorrow, but it’s PNAS). Wade states:They put the numb…
Localizing recent positive selection in humans using multiple statistics
Online this week in Science, a group presents a method for identifying genes under positive selection in humans, and gives some examples. I have somewhat mixed feelings about this paper, for reasons I’ll get to, but here’s their basic idea:Readers of t…
Coincidence or adaptation?
Different Evolutionary Histories of the Coagulation Factor VII Gene in Human Populations?:Immoderate blood clotting constitutes a risk factor for cardiovascular disease in modern industrialised societies, but is believed to have conferred a survival ad…
Carbs & ancestry
Stable Patterns of Gene Expression Regulating Carbohydrate Metabolism Determined by Geographic Ancestry:Methodology/Principal FindingsUsing a combination of genetic/genomic and bioinformatics approaches, we identified a large number of genes that were …
GWAS, population structure and the Han Chinese
Two new articles in AJHG, Genomic Dissection of Population Substructure of Han Chinese and Its Implication in Association Studies:To date, most genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and studies of fine-scale population structure have been conducted pr…
Why whales get no bigger
Carl Zimmer reports that it might be a function of physics. Bigger whales have proportionality bigger mouths, but at some point the biological engineering runs up against constraints:s they report today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Goldboge…
1 million SNPs to bind us all
A a new paper in PLoS ONE, Genetic Variation and Recent Positive Selection in Worldwide Human Populations: Evidence from Nearly 1 Million SNPs:Our analyses both confirm and extend previous studies; in particular, we highlight the impact of various disp…
Latin America is not panmixia
A new provisional paper, Ancestry-related assortative mating in latino populations. Here are the results:Using 104 ancestry informative markers, we examined spouse correlations in genetic ancestry for Mexican spouse pairs recruited from Mexico City and…
TCHH & curly hair in Europeans
Common Variants in the Trichohyalin Gene Are Associated with Straight Hair in Europeans:Hair morphology is highly differentiated between populations and among people of European ancestry. Whereas hair morphology in East Asian populations has been studi…
The quest for common variants & cognition
A genome-wide study of common SNPs and CNVs in cognitive performance in the CANTAB:Psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia are commonly accompanied by cognitive impairments that are treatment resistant and crucial to functional outcome. There has b…