Comparing signals of natural selection between three Indigenous North American populations.

While many studies have highlighted human adaptations to diverse environments worldwide, genomic studies of natural selection in Indigenous populations in the Americas have been absent from this literature until very recently. Since humans first entered the Americas some 20,000 years ago, they have settled in many new environments across the continent. This diversity of environments has placed variable selective pressures on the populations living in each region, but the effects of these pressures have not been extensively studied to date.

Interaction of Alu Polymorphisms and Novel Measures of Discrimination in Association with Blood Pressure in African Americans Living in Tallahassee, Florida.

African Americans are 40% more likely to be afflicted with hypertension than are non-Hispanic, white Americans, resulting in a 30% higher instance of mortality due to cardiovascular disease. There is debate about the relative contributions of genetic and sociocultural risk factors to the racial disparity in hypertension. We assayed three Alu insertion polymorphisms located in the ACE (angiotensin 1 converting enzyme), PLAT (plasminogen activator, tissue), and WNK1 (lysine deficient protein kinase 1) genes.

Bayesian analyses of Yemeni mitochondrial genomes suggest multiple migration events with Africa and Western Eurasia.

Objectives: Anatomically, modern humans are thought to have migrated out of Africa ∼60,000 years ago in the first successful global dispersal. This initial migration may have passed through Yemen, a region that has experienced multiple migrations events with Africa and Eurasia throughout human history. We use Bayesian phylogenetics to determine how ancient and recent migrations have shaped Yemeni mitogenomic variation.

Human migration patterns in Yemen and implications for reconstructing prehistoric population movements.

Population migration has played an important role in human evolutionary history and in the patterning of human genetic variation. A deeper and empirically-based understanding of human migration dynamics is needed in order to interpret genetic and archaeological evidence and to accurately reconstruct the prehistoric processes that comprise human evolutionary history. Current empirical estimates of migration include either short time frames (i.

Human demographic processes and genetic variation as revealed by mtDNA simulations.

Humans' ability for rapid dispersal and adaptation has allowed us to colonize diverse geographic and climatic regions of the planet, creating a complex evolutionary history. This complexity can be understood, at least partially, by modeling the underlying demographic parameters in the evolutionary process. In this study, we analyze a model of human evolution in which population size, gene flow (GF), and time are varied.

Isolation and characterization of novel microsatellites from the critically endangered hawksbill sea turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata).

We isolated and characterized 12 microsatellite loci from the hawksbill sea turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata). The loci exhibited a variable number of alleles that ranged from three to 14 with an average observed heterozygosity of 0.70 (SD 0.