selection on candidate genes
dgmacarthur | June 3, 2009Razib from Gene Expression has a frankly heroic post up dissecting a recent paper on genetic variation around the FUT2 gene, which encodes a cell surface protein involved in the pathway that produces the ABO blood group antigens.
The story illustrates some of the difficulties associated with extracting information about human evolution from genetic sequence data. There is fairly compelling a priori evidence for natural selection having a strong effect on this gene during recent human evolution, but even with data on genetic variation from a large sample of worldwide populations it is…