A recent study that is a collaboration between Naoki Masuda, Marie Saitou, and my lab is now online Molecular Biology and Evolution. It is a clever construct by Naoki to collectively analyze the allele frequency distributions of different structural variants across the globe. We identified several interesting candidates, including those that were already on our collective radar (e.g., Defensins, Amylase, CCL, SIGLECs, etc.) but also some others that may be of interest.
Our results also add to the growing notion that multiallelic gene copy number variation is a major driver for functional/phenotypic diversity.