Recent Positive Selection Drives the Expansion of a Schizophrenia Risk Nonsynonymous Variant at SLC39A8 in Europeans.

ABSTRACT: Natural selection has played important roles in optimizing complex human adaptations. However, schizophrenia poses an evolutionary paradox during human evolution, as the illness has strongly negative effects on fitness, but persists with a prevalence of ~0.5% across global populations. Recent studies have identified numerous risk variations in diverse populations, which might be able to explain the stable and high rate of schizophrenia morbidity in different cultures and regions, but the questions about why the risk alleles derived and maintained in human gene pool still remain unsolved. Here, we studied the evolutionary pattern of a schizophrenia risk variant rs13107325 (P < 5.0 × 10(-8) in Europeans) in the SLC39A8 gene. We found the SNP is monomorphic in Asians and Africans with risk (d

SUBMITTER: Li M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4681542 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature