Strong signature of natural selection within an FHIT intron implicated in prostate cancer risk

Previously, a candidate gene linkage approach on brother pairs affected with prostate cancer identified a locus of prostate cancer susceptibility at D3S1234 within the fragile histidine triad gene (FHIT), a tumor suppressor that induces apoptosis. Subsequent association tests on 16 SNPs spanning approximately 381 kb surrounding D3S1234 in Americans of European descent revealed significant evidence of association for a single SNP within intron 5 of FHIT. In the current study, resequencing and genotyping within a 28.5 kb region surrounding this SNP further delineated the association with prostate cancer risk to a 15 kb region. Multiple SNPs in sequences under evolutionary constraint within intron 5 of FHIT defined several related haplotypes with an increased risk of prostate cancer in European-Americans. Strong associations were detected for a risk haplotype defined by SNPs 138543, 142413, and 152494 in all cases (Pearson's χ2 = 12.34, df 1, P = 0.00045) and for the homozygous risk haplotype defined by SNPs 144716, 142413, and 148444 in cases that shared 2 alleles identical by descent with their affected brothers (Pearson's χ2 = 11.50, df 1, P = 0.00070). In addition to highly conserved sequences encompassing SNPs 148444 and 152413, population studies revealed strong signatures of natural selection for a 1 kb window covering the SNP 144716 in two human populations, the European American (π = 0.0072, Tajima's D= 3.31, 14 SNPs) and the Japanese (π = 0.0049, Fay & Wu's H = 8.05, 14 SNPs), as well as in chimpanzees (Fay & Wu's H = 8.62, 12 SNPs). These results strongly support the involvement of the FHIT intronic region in an increased risk of prostate cancer. © 2008 Ding et al

Integrating the processes in the evolutionary system of domestication

Genetics has long been used as a source of evidence to understand domestication origins. A recent shift in the emphasis of archaeological evidence from a rapid transition paradigm of hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists, to a protracted transition paradigm has highlighted how the scientific framework of interpretation of genetic data was quite dependent on archaeological evidence, resulting in a period of discord in which the two evidence types appeared to support different paradigms. Further examination showed that the discriminatory power of the approaches employed in genetics was low, and framed within the rapid paradigm rather than testing it. In order to interpret genetic data under the new protracted paradigm it must be taken into account how that paradigm changes our expectations of genetic diversity. Preliminary examination suggests that a number of features that constituted key evidence in the rapid paradigm are likely to be interpreted very differently in the protracted paradigm. Specifically, in the protracted transition the mode and mechanisms involved in the evolution of the domestication syndrome have become much more influential in the shape of genetic diversity. The result is that numerous factors interacting over several levels of organization in a domestication system need to be taken into account in order to understand the evolution of the process. This presents a complex problem of integration of different data types which is difficult to describe formally. One possible way forward is to use Bayesian approximation approaches that allow complex systems to be measured in a way that does not require such formality

Allele Frequency Matching Between SNPs Reveals an Excess of Linkage Disequilibrium in Genic Regions of the Human Genome

Significant interest has emerged in mapping genetic susceptibility for complex traits through whole-genome association studies. These studies rely on the extent of association, i.e., linkage disequilibrium (LD), between single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) across the human genome. LD describes the nonrandom association between SNP pairs and can be used as a metric when designing maximally informative panels of SNPs for association studies in human populations. Using data from the 1.58 million SNPs genotyped by Perlegen, we explored the allele frequency dependence of the LD statistic r (2) both empirically and theoretically. We show that average r (2) values between SNPs unmatched for allele frequency are always limited to much less than 1 (theoretical [Image: see text] approximately 0.46 to 0.57 for this dataset). Frequency matching of SNP pairs provides a more sensitive measure for assessing the average decay of LD and generates average r (2) values across nearly the entire informative range (from 0 to 0.89 through 0.95). Additionally, we analyzed the extent of perfect LD (r (2) = 1.0) using frequency-matched SNPs and found significant differences in the extent of LD in genic regions versus intergenic regions. The SNP pairs exhibiting perfect LD showed a significant bias for derived, nonancestral alleles, providing evidence for positive natural selection in the human genome

Follow-up examination of linkage and association to chromosome 1q43 in multiple sclerosis.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a debilitating neuroimmunological and neurodegenerative disease affecting >4,00,000 individuals in the United States. Population and family-based studies have suggested that there is a strong genetic component. Numerous genomic linkage screens have identified regions of interest for MS loci. Our own second-generation genome-wide linkage study identified a handful of non-major histocompatibility complex regions with suggestive linkage. Several of these regions were further examined using single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with average spacing between SNPs of approximately 1.0 Mb in a dataset of 173 multiplex families. The results of that study provided further evidence for the involvement of the chromosome 1q43 region. This region is of particular interest given linkage evidence in studies of other autoimmune and inflammatory diseases including rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus. In this follow-up study, we saturated the region with approximately 700 SNPs (average spacing of 10 kb per SNP) in search of disease-associated variation within this region. We found preliminary evidence to suggest that common variation within the RGS7 locus may be involved in disease susceptibility

Population Structure and Cryptic Relatedness in Genetic Association Studies

We review the problem of confounding in genetic association studies, which arises principally because of population structure and cryptic relatedness. Many treatments of the problem consider only a simple ``island'' model of population structure. We take a broader approach, which views population structure and cryptic relatedness as different aspects of a single confounder: the unobserved pedigree defining the (often distant) relationships among the study subjects. Kinship is therefore a central concept, and we review methods of defining and estimating kinship coefficients, both pedigree-based and marker-based. In this unified framework we review solutions to the problem of population structure, including family-based study designs, genomic control, structured association, regression control, principal components adjustment and linear mixed models. The last solution makes the most explicit use of the kinships among the study subjects, and has an established role in the analysis of animal and plant breeding studies. Recent computational developments mean that analyses of human genetic association data are beginning to benefit from its powerful tests for association, which protect against population structure and cryptic kinship, as well as intermediate levels of confounding by the pedigree.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-STS307 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Genome resequencing reveals multiscale geographic structure and extensive linkage disequilibrium in the forest tree Populus trichocarpa

This is the publisher’s final pdf. The article is copyrighted by the New Phytologist Trust and published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. It can be found at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/%28ISSN%291469-8137. To the best of our knowledge, one or more authors of this paper were federal employees when contributing to this work.•Plant population genomics informs evolutionary biology, breeding, conservation and bioenergy feedstock development. For example, the detection of reliable phenotype–genotype associations and molecular signatures of selection requires a detailed knowledge about genome-wide patterns of allele frequency variation, linkage disequilibrium and recombination.\ud •We resequenced 16 genomes of the model tree Populus trichocarpa and genotyped 120 trees from 10 subpopulations using 29 213 single-nucleotide polymorphisms.\ud •Significant geographic differentiation was present at multiple spatial scales, and range-wide latitudinal allele frequency gradients were strikingly common across the genome. The decay of linkage disequilibrium with physical distance was slower than expected from previous studies in Populus, with r² dropping below 0.2 within 3–6 kb. Consistent with this, estimates of recent effective population size from linkage disequilibrium (N[subscript e] ≈ 4000–6000) were remarkably low relative to the large census sizes of P. trichocarpa stands. Fine-scale rates of recombination varied widely across the genome, but were largely predictable on the basis of DNA sequence and methylation features.\ud •Our results suggest that genetic drift has played a significant role in the recent evolutionary history of P. trichocarpa. Most importantly, the extensive linkage disequilibrium detected suggests that genome-wide association studies and genomic selection in undomesticated populations may be more feasible in Populus than previously assumed