Most of the harmful mutations in people arose in the past 5,000 to 10,000 years
December 4, 2012
(Credit: iStockphoto)
The human genome has been busy over the past 5,000 years. Human populations have grown exponentially, and new genetic mutations arise with each generation, says Nature News.
Humans now have a vast abundance of rare genetic variants in the protein-encoding sections of the genome.
A study published in Nature now helps to clarify when many of those rare variants arose.
Researchers used deep sequencing to locate and date more than one million single-nucleotide variants — locations where a single letter of the DNA sequence is different from other individuals — in the genomes of 6,500 African and European Americans.
The findings confirm their earlier work suggesting that the majority of variants, including potentially harmful ones, were picked up during the past 5,000–-10,000 years. …
Cumulative proportion of single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) for a given allele age. The inset highlights the cumulative proportion of SNVs that are estimated to have arisen in the last 50,000 years. The x axis denotes allele age (x 1,000) and the y axis indicates the the cumulative proportion of SNVs (%). EA: European Americans; AA: African Americans. (Credit: Wenqing Fu et al./Nature)
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Comments (9)
by Cybernettr
If European Americans have a larger proportion of potentially harmful variants than African Americans than one wonders why they tend to live longer than blacks due to their lack of such diseases as Sickle Cell Anemia, etc. In the area of longevity, Asians tend to be at the top, whites in the middle and blacks at the bottom, wholly independent of environmental factors.
by lamont
This 5,000-10,000 time frame is somewhat consistent with one (young Earth) Creationist view on when human beings-in our present form- first populated the Earth.
by Dan Robinson
Dare I say it? As we develop larger scale health care, hospitals and such, less desirable genes have been helped to survive. Perhaps unfortunately, this seems to support the basic conservative paradigm, that we should all take care of ourselves, our descendants and maybe our siblings’ descendents, and let the others take care of themselves. (But then we go on to supporting our ancsestors’ descendants and eventually there’s no place to draw the line.) We need (and always did) to take a new look at the differences between left and right. Of course we also need to have a realistic view on caring for our whole biosphere, on which we’re all dependent.
by Mr.X
“European Americans ”
There is no such thing.Just call it caucasian, like you always do;)
But otherwise: Good news!
by Dayken
LOL yea people are people but you know they have make sound all fancy ans so on. ITs all human to me
by charles dufarle
I have only two words to say
“Red Queen”
by peter g
it seems whites are more likely to get aggressive cancer outcomes from what i’ve read elsewhere
this would confirm that
by Bri
It’s a shame there wasn’t mote information presented in the article. A nice graph of number of mutations over an extensive time period, say 100,000 years would be more illuminating. Population sizes and migration patterns in relation to mutations would also help. There is no doubt that bottlenecks have occured in migratory groups. I tend to think that migration probably has had the largest impact, but it’s hard to say from such scant information.
by Editor
Bri, I added the chart from the Nature article that seems most relevant to your questions, and you’re right about the influence of migrations:
As noted in a press release: http://www.washington.edu/news/2012/11/28/harmful-protein-coding-mutations-in-people-arose-largely-in-the-past-5000-to-10000-years/ :