Publications by authors named "Melissa Spear"

People in the Americas represent a diverse continuum of populations with varying degrees of admixture among African, European, and Amerindigenous ancestries. In the United States, populations with non-European ancestry remain understudied, and thus little is known about the genetic architecture of phenotypic variation in these populations. Using genotype data from the Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos, we find that Amerindigenous ancestry increased by an average of ~20% spanning 1940s-1990s in Mexican Americans.

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Ebola virus (EBOV) disease is a viral hemorrhagic fever with a high case-fatality rate in humans. This disease is caused by four members of the filoviral genus , including EBOV. The natural hosts reservoirs of ebolaviruses remain to be identified.

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Short-acting β-adrenergic receptor agonists (SABAs) are the most commonly prescribed asthma medications worldwide. Response to SABAs is measured as bronchodilator drug response (BDR), which varies among racial/ethnic groups in the United States. However, the genetic variation that contributes to BDR is largely undefined in African Americans with asthma.

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Statistical models in medical and population genetics typically assume that individuals assort randomly in a population. While this simplifies model complexity, it contradicts an increasing body of evidence of nonrandom mating in human populations. Specifically, it has been shown that assortative mating is significantly affected by genomic ancestry.

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Article Synopsis
  • Stress is linked to increased asthma problems in Puerto Rican children, who show lower bronchodilator responses (BDR).
  • The study assessed stress levels in both children and their mothers, finding that high stress in either correlates with a significant decrease in BDR among Puerto Rican kids with asthma.
  • A specific genetic variation (polymorphism) in the ADCYAP1R1 gene is also connected to reduced BDR, suggesting that stress may influence asthma through genetic factors that regulate anxiety and receptor expression.
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