Izzy Starr (they/them/their) led this project along with our collaborators Ani Sinha, and Kristina Seiffert to investigate the relationship between recent evolution and immune-mediated trends in human skin. Our major finding is that there are specific genes that are expressed in a human-specific manner in the skin which are also involved in psoriasis. Further, these… Continue reading New paper: Thick-skinned apes
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… Continue reading New paper: Using multiple populations to investigate deviations across geographies – structural variation edition
Our paper on adaptive evolution of a very common, exonic deletion polymorphism is now published in Science Advances. https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.abi4476 Our press office did an excellent job as usual - The press release is here: http://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2021/09/030.html This study is interesting in our opinion for three main reasons: We are showing that the adaptive pressures acting on… Continue reading New paper: Sex- and environment dependent adaptive evolution of a common deletion in human growth hormone receptor
Stefan (Ruhl) and I recently published a comprehensive survey of the amylase gene copy number and salivary enzyme activity among mammalian species eLife. Petar (Pajic) was the driving force for the sample collection and analysis. Briefly, we found that 1. Amylase copy number evolves extremely fast leading to independent (I daresay convergent) bursts among mammals… Continue reading New paper: Independent amylase gene duplications
A whole gene deletion sounds awful! You lose one entire gene and hence the protein that this gene is coding. However, there exist several gene deletions which have been maintained polymorphically among human populations. In our previous work, we found that a cellular detoxification gene, the GSTM1, to remain polymorphically deleted in both humans and… Continue reading New Paper: An incomplete sweep of a metabolizing gene
An evolutionary transcriptomics approach links CD36 to membrane remodeling in replicative senescence Press release by Charlotte Hsu Academic minute podcast by our collaborator Ekin Atilla The evolution of cellular senescence is a remarkable question. It connects to development, organismal life-span, protection against cancer, and its rate seems to vary between species. Moreover, since life-span of… Continue reading New paper: Evolutionary biology of cellular aging (We got the cover)
Our lab has been excited by genomic structural variation because we believe that they underlie a considerable and underappreciated part of the phenotypic variation in primates. It is just that they are challenging to study and come up with straightforward evolutionary stories. Most of the time, what we find is much more complicated than we… Continue reading New paper: Structural variants are awesome – And they affect detoxification genes
We have a new paper -two years in the making - where we showed evidence for introgression from an African archaic hominin to the ancestors of modern humans. This is a relatively big and, I have to admit, a serendipitous finding, corroborating the emerging notion that an "interbreeding bonanza" has shaped our ancestors. I do… Continue reading New paper: Of archaic admixture in Africa, cherries, and serendipity
I wanted to write this post to discuss an interesting discussion going on with regards to evolutionary basis of human complex diseases. It stems from our paper that looked into the evolution of skin barrier related gene, called fillagrin (FLG). FLG stood out for four conceivable reasons. See this review for more. (i) It is huge.… Continue reading A note on evolution and disease
We have helped Cemali Bekpen and the Max Planck Evolutionary Biology Group of Dr. Tautz in resolving a very complicated and variable gene duplication. Even though, some of the trends remain fuzzy, it is now clear that gene duplications of SPATA31 diversified in humans and remain variable. What is more, some of their function has to do… Continue reading New paper: Of light, duplications and UV protection
Buffalo Evolutionary and Anthropological Genomics Laboratory (BEAGL) 