Tag Archives: Homo sapiens

The Kennewick, and the Oase I

Posted on 25 Jun, 2015 by Arun Sethuraman

Last week was glorious for ancient DNA enthusiasts – here are some quick blurbs on findings from genomic analyses of the Kennewick man, and the Oase I individual. The ancestry and affiliations of Kennewick Man, Rasmussen et al. (2015) Nature DOI: … Continue reading →

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Genomic history of Eurasia

Posted on 11 Jun, 2015 by Arun Sethuraman

The route of modern humans out of Africa has been contentious, with archaeological and genetic finds pointing towards a route through Egypt, versus one through Ethiopia. Pagani et al. (2015) analyze the genomic admixture of individuals sampled from both Egypt … Continue reading →

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Quantifying risks of consanguineous mating in humans

Posted on 30 Apr, 2015 by Arun Sethuraman

The efficacy of selection in purging a deleterious mutation from a randomly mating population depends on numerous factors, including dominance effects of alleles – see my previous posts. Simplistically, most new mutations are expected to be heterozygotic, and be purged … Continue reading →

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F-statistics Manhattan Plots in R

Posted on 26 Mar, 2015 by Arun Sethuraman

Characterizing differentiation across individual genomes sampled from different populations can be very informative of the demographic processes that resulted in the differentiation in the first place. Manhattan plots have grown to be very popular representations of genome-wide differentiation statistics in … Continue reading →

Posted in bioinformatics, genomics, howto, population genetics, R, software | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

dN(eutralist) > dS(electionist)? Part 2

Posted on 5 Mar, 2015 by Arun Sethuraman

Last week’s post dealt with the debate over differences in the efficacy of purifying selection across human genomes. This week, we’ll look at the differences in de novo mutation rates across populations. The human de novo mutation rate has gone … Continue reading →

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Twice Mixed? Testing hypotheses of Neanderthal Introgression

Posted on 19 Feb, 2015 by Arun Sethuraman

Human migration in, and out of Africa was wrought with complex patterns of admixture (see my previous post summarizing the story so far). Of note were some recent findings on the disparity in amounts of Neanderthal introgression/ancestry between East Asians … Continue reading →

Posted in adaptation, bioinformatics, evolution, genomics, mutation, Paleogenomics, population genetics | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Phonemes and Genomes

Posted on 5 Feb, 2015 by Arun Sethuraman

Human phonemes and genomes are thought to have evolved hand-in-glove out of Africa. Several recent studies have attempted to capture a picture of this global variation in languages and peoples, often supporting (and rejecting) a serial founder model (eg. see … Continue reading →

Posted in bioinformatics, evolution, genomics, phylogenetics, population genetics | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Recent Ancestry of the USA and the 100k Genome Project

Posted on 8 Jan, 2015 by Arun Sethuraman

Holiday presents for pop-gen enthusiasts come in the form of data – boatloads of it! The past two weeks saw the announcements of two neat studies that spell monumental steps toward our understanding of the genetics of mixed populations. With … Continue reading →

Posted in genomics, population genetics | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

The Ust'-Ishim Genome

Posted on 6 Nov, 2014 by Arun Sethuraman

This year has been monumental in pulling together several interesting pieces in the human evolution out of Africa puzzle (Lazaridis et al., Ruiz-Linares et al., Skoglund et al., Huerta-Sanchez et al., Jeong et al., Pickrell et al., Raghavan et al., … Continue reading →

Posted in genomics, mutation, Paleogenomics, population genetics | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

How A Troublesome Inheritance gets human genetics wrong

Posted on 29 May, 2014 by Jeremy Yoder

Probably since before the origin of modern Homo sapiens, we have known that people from other places—the next village over, the other side of the mountains, or some distant and unexplored land—were different from us. Some of those differences were … Continue reading →

Posted in book review, genomics, population genetics | Tagged , , | 19 Comments