Genome-wide comparison of African-ancestry populations from CARe and other cohorts reveals signals of natural selection.

ABSTRACT: The study of recent natural selection in human populations has important applications to human history and medicine. Positive natural selection drives the increase in beneficial alleles and plays a role in explaining diversity across human populations. By discovering traits subject to positive selection, we can better understand the population level response to environmental pressures including infectious disease. Our study examines unusual population differentiation between three large data sets to detect natural selection. The populations examined, African Americans, Nigerians, and Gambians, are genetically close to one another (F(ST) < 0.01 for all pairs), allowing us to detect selection even with moderate changes in allele frequency. We also develop a tree-based method to pinpoint the

SUBMITTER: Bhatia G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3169818 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature