Natural selection

Why this topic Ancient DNA sequencing has gone from a handful of skeletons a decade ago to thousands today, and new statistical methods can now track an allele's frequency rising or falling generation by generation instead of only comparing populations as they exist now. The loci it keeps returning to are largely the same six or seven names population genetics has pointed to for twenty years.

What this topic connects to

Solid lines are connections this site curates. Dashed lines mean the two ends share a research paper — worth knowing, and not a claim that one explains the other.

Named by the study itself

These six are not co-mentions. Each is among the most thoroughly confirmed targets of positive selection in the human genome, established by a dedicated population-genetics study distinct from the paper that first described the variant's effect: LCT and lactase persistence (Bersaglieri et al. 2004), ALDH2 and the alcohol-flush reaction (Oota et al. 2004), EDAR and hair and sweat-gland variation (Kamberov et al. 2013), SLC45A2 and skin pigmentation (Norton et al. 2007), G6PD deficiency, which cuts the risk of severe malaria by 46-58% (Ruwende et al. 1995), and the Duffy blood group, whose null allele shows the largest population-frequency difference ever measured at a single human locus and confers complete resistance to one form of malaria (Hamblin & Di Rienzo 2000).

Variants that share a paper with this

Counted in Europe PMC, where the title or abstract names both this topic and that rsID. The number is papers, not evidence of a cause.

Questions about Natural selection