genetic variation
Gene Expression
Tag archives for genetic variation
Genetic structure of Eastern European populations
Posted by Razib Khan on May 10, 2009 A few months ago I relayed preliminary data which suggested that Estonians are not like Finns. Now a new paper, Genetic Structure of Europeans: A View from the North-East: Using principal component (PC) analysis, we studied the genetic constitution of 3,112 individuals from Europe as portrayed by more than 270,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) genotyped…
Genetic distance between populations
Posted by Razib Khan on May 5, 2009 In the comments below on the post on human population structure there was some request for a bigger global perspective. Below the fold I’ve placed a table with FST values which compare each population to the other. This an older population genetic statistic derived from the work of Sewall Wright, but you are almost certainly…
Human population structure, part n
Posted by Razib Khan on May 3, 2009 I still remember when L. L. Cavalli-Sforza’s The History and Geography of Human Genes was a candle in the dark, illuminating human history with slivers of genetic data laboriously gathered and analyzed over decades. We’ve come a long way. Dienekes points me to a new paper, Fine-scaled human genetic structure revealed by SNP microarrays: We…
African genetic structure
Posted by Razib Khan on April 30, 2009 I’ve been fine tuning Ubuntu all day with goodies and getting drivers to work right, so I missed this paper on African genetics: Africa is the source of all modern humans, but characterization of genetic variation and of relationships among populations across the continent has been enigmatic. We studied 121 African populations, 4 African American…
One New World population expansion
Posted by Razib Khan on April 29, 2009 Haplotypic Background of a Private Allele at High Frequency in the Americas: Recently, the observation of a high-frequency private allele, the 9-repeat allele at microsatellite D9S1120, in all sampled Native American and Western Beringian populations has been interpreted as evidence that all modern Native Americans descend primarily from a single founding population. However, this inference…
The genetic architecture of different populations
Posted by Razib Khan on April 28, 2009 Dan MacArthur has a post, Genetics of complex traits in Europeans and East Asians: similarities and differences: With those goals in mind, you can expect to see many more GWAS of non-European populations over the next couple of years, and some explicit comparisons of the differing genetic architecture of complex traits between populations. Exciting times…
Folate & fertility & skin color
Posted by Razib Khan on April 27, 2009 On the order of ~1 million years ago humans seem to have evolved dark skin. While light skin evolved several times, it looks like dark skin exhibits an “consensus sequence,” so that all dark skinned peoples seem to have the same genetic architecture. This chart (from Signatures of Positive Selection in Genes Associated with Human…
Culture doesn’t cause borderline personality disorder
Posted by Razib Khan on April 26, 2009 Thankfully. Familial Resemblance of Borderline Personality Disorder Features: Genetic or Cultural Transmission?: Borderline personality disorder is a severe personality disorder for which genetic research has been limited to family studies and classical twin studies. These studies indicate that genetic effects explain 35 to 45% of the variance in borderline personality disorder and borderline personality features.…
Cattle genetic variation & evolution
Posted by Razib Khan on April 23, 2009 There are some papers out on the genome of the domestic cow out right now. ScienceNews has an overview: Two competing research teams have cataloged the “essence of bovinity” found in the DNA of cattle, but not without disagreement on some essential points. Reporting online April 23 in Science and April 24 in Genome Biology,…
In search of rare variants
Posted by Razib Khan on April 20, 2009 In response to the NEJM issue on personal genomics and the CDCV hypothesis, p-ter offers a proposal: Let’s follow Goldstein’s back-of-the-envelope calculations: assume there are ~100K polymorphisms (assuming Goldstein isn’t making the mistake I attribute to him, this includes polymorphisms both common and rare) that contribute to human height, that we’ve found the ones that…