Publications

Abstract An increasing body of archaeological and genomic evidence has hinted at a complex settlement process of the Americas by humans. This is especially true for South America, where unexpected ancestral signals have raised perplexing

Abstract Objectives Since 2010, genome-wide data from hundreds of ancient Native Americans have contributed to the understanding of Americas’ prehistory. However, these samples have never been studied as a single dataset, and distinct relationships among

Abstract Chemosensation (olfaction, taste) is essential for detecting and assessing foods, such that dietary shifts elicit evolutionary changes in vertebrate chemosensory genes. The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture dramatically altered how humans acquire

Abstract Unlike PIWI-interacting RNA (piRNA) in other species that mostly target transposable elements (TEs), >80% of piRNAs in adult mammalian testes lack obvious targets. However, mammalian piRNA sequences and piRNA-producing loci evolve more rapidly than

Abstract How novel gene functions evolve is a fundamental question in biology. Mucin proteins, a functionally but not evolutionarily defined group of proteins, allow the study of convergent evolution of gene function. By analyzing the

Abstract Structural variants have a considerable impact on human genomic diversity. However, their evolutionary history remains mostly unexplored. Here, we developed a new method to identify potentially adaptive structural variants based on a similarity-based analysis

Highlights Summary Salivary proteins are essential for maintaining health in the oral cavity and proximal digestive tract, and they serve as potential diagnostic markers for monitoring human health and disease. However, their precise organ origins

Abstract Although analysis of modern and ancient genomes showed that Neanderthals contributed genetic material to the ancestors of extant human populations, when and where Neanderthals interacted with modern human populations remain exciting… The time, extent,

Abstract Genomic structural variants (SVs) are distributed nonrandomly across the human genome. The “hotspots” of SVs have been implicated in evolutionary innovations, as well as medical conditions. However, the evolutionary and biomedical features of these