genetics 内の ahtr によるリンク Hong Kong to shame litterbugs by using DNA testing

[–]jjberg2 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

Ugh, yeah, as the author states, there is pretty much no scientific basis for this at all.

science 内の godsenfrik によるリンク The evolutionary advantage of homosexuality in fruit flies has been discovered: females with the genetic changes associated with the trait display higher reproductive rates.

[–]jjberg2 4ポイント5ポイント  (0子コメント)

So individuals are more likely to be around other individuals of he same gender they're projecting?

No. The argument is that there could be alleles (particular copies of genes) which simply make their carriers more attracted to males, regardless of whether the individual in which they reside is male of female.

If you have this allele and you are female, you are more attracted to males than those who don't, and so on average, you are probably more likely to have offspring and thus pass on that allele. If you are male and you have that allele, you are also more likely to be attracted to males, but of course this is likely to result in fewer offspring, and you are less likely to pass on that allele.

This can happen due to the unavoidable fact that males and females are, for the most part, built using the same set of genes. All an allele needs to do to be favored by natural selection then is to increase the average reproductive fitness across males and females. The presence of same-sex sexual behaviors in spite of the seemingly obvious negative impact they should have on reproductive output can then be explained (at least in principle, and in Drosophila, perhaps in fact, according to this study) by the existence of genes which make their carriers more attracted to members of one particular sex regardless of the sex of the carrier, so long as the reproductive advantage in one sex exceeds the disadvantage in the other.

edited for grammar

askscience 内の kissonthis01 によるリンク Because I only receive the Y chromosome from my dad, do I share any blood with the women on my dad's side? (ie his sisters/my aunts)

[–]jjberg2 20ポイント21ポイント  (0子コメント)

You don't only inherit your dad's Y chromosome.

Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, composed of 22 autosomes and one pair of sex chromosomes. For the sex chromosomes, males inherit the Y from their fathers and the X from their mothers, but you also inherit a full complement of 22 autosomes from each of your parents (the sex chromosomes constitute only about 5% of the genome, so the autosomes constitute most of the "blood" that you share with your relatives). They, in turn, inherited one of each autosome from each of their parents, and so you've inherited on average about one half of each of your autosomes (or about 1/4 of your total autosomal ancestry) from each grandparent (in reality, there is some variation, due to genetic recombination), but it's generally between 20% and 30% for each grandparent).

Your dad's sisters inherit one half of their genome from their mom (your paternal grandmother) and one half from their dad (your paternal grandfather). Their inheritance is independent of yours (i.e. having knowledge about which portions of your grandparents genome you've inherited doesn't give me any information about which portions they've inherited).

This means that figuring out how much of your genome you share with your aunt due to common inheritance from your two paternal grandparents is as simple as multiplying together the amount that you've each inherited from each of your grandparents. You got 25% from your grandmother, whereas she got 50%, so you share 12.5% inherited from her, while you also got 25% from grandpa, whereas she again got 50%, which makes another 12.5%.

You therefore share a total of 25% of your autosomal DNA with your aunt.

askscience 内の polyheathon によるリンク Is there something comparable to blood types in other species?

[–]jjberg2 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

I don't recall the exact chronology, but I believe the ABO system wasn't worked out until about 1912 or thereabouts, so there'd already been a fair bit of work in Drosophila, and Morgan and co had already worked out that the genes were on the chromosomes.

askscience 内の Deathsmith8 によるリンク What allele frequency is changing fastest in the human population?

[–]jjberg2 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

but it's not applicable to reality

I think this is a common misunderstanding, actually. There's that whole list of things you need to satisfy (no selection, no mutation, infinite population size, etc.), but in fact, because you return to Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium after just a single generation of random mating, that turns out to be the only one that you really need. While most populations don't mate randomly at the global level, it turns out that for the vast majority of genes in the genome, individuals do essentially mate randomly with respect to genotype, and therefore Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium does hold:

http://gcbias.org/2011/10/13/population-genetics-course-resources-hardy-weinberg-eq/

In fact, in modern genomics, it is common for any genetic markers which do not meet HWE to be thrown out, as it's likely that there's been some sort of technical error when something like that happens.

askscience 内の Deathsmith8 によるリンク What allele frequency is changing fastest in the human population?

[–]jjberg2 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

You're about a year too late: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-25885519

(and it looks like it was probably true, so I don't know that I'd really call it sensationalist)

askscience 内の Deathsmith8 によるリンク What allele frequency is changing fastest in the human population?

[–]jjberg2 4ポイント5ポイント  (0子コメント)

where all the research is done in modern genomes

It's worth noting that this has ceased to be true as of a few months ago, as we are starting to see selection analyses on the basis of ancient DNA samples:

http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/03/13/016477

but yeah, the comment OP here seems a little confused about their own links.

askscience 内の Deathsmith8 によるリンク What allele frequency is changing fastest in the human population?

[–]jjberg2 21ポイント22ポイント  (0子コメント)

Alleles do not convert

Well, they actually can, it just doesn't have anything to do with recessivity/dominance, as you explain very well.

askscience 内の Deathsmith8 によるリンク What allele frequency is changing fastest in the human population?

[–]jjberg2 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

Well, yeah, so it depends on what you're interested in.

If you're interested in demographics then you look at whole genome patterns of allele frequency change, (e.g. as this analysis of the same ancient individuals I cited in my answer did) but if you're more interested in biology you try to find individual genes which cut against the whole genome patterns.

I think perhaps we agree on pretty much everything technical but probably slightly disagree about what the most interesting things to study are (which is as it should be).

askscience 内の Deathsmith8 によるリンク What allele frequency is changing fastest in the human population?

[–]jjberg2 7ポイント8ポイント  (0子コメント)

All real species fail the criteria for Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium in a formal sense for obvious reasons (i.e. population sizes are not infinite), but in fact, all that really needs to hold in order for a loose form of Hardy-Weinberg to hold on generation to generation timescales is for mating to be approximately random. This is obviously not true on a global level, but perhaps surprisingly does actually apply for most of the genome on a more local level, and so most populations (human or not) are actually in HWE (in the sense that given allele frequencies p and q, the genotype frequencies are approximately p2, 2pq and q2) for most of the genome, e.g. http://gcbias.org/2011/10/13/population-genetics-course-resources-hardy-weinberg-eq/

askscience 内の Deathsmith8 によるリンク What allele frequency is changing fastest in the human population?

[–]jjberg2 78ポイント79ポイント  (0子コメント)

Allele is a term used to describe different versions of a particular gene (we'll call it "Gene 1"). We might imagine that some gene has two versions, which we'll label 'A' and 'B'. Now, if we go into the population and choose a random individual we'd find that they either carry two copies of the 'A' allele for Gene 1, two copies of the 'B' allele, or one copy of the 'A' allele and one copy of the 'B' allele (there are two copies because humans are diploid, which means that they have two copies of every chromosome, and those two copies of every gene, with a few exceptions).

Now, imagine there's a population with N individuals in it, and we went and checked Gene 1 in every individuals and recorded how many A and B alleles there were in the whole population. The "allele frequency" of the 'A' allele would just be the total number of 'A' alleles in the population, divided by the total number of copies of Gene 1 in the populations, so

(# of A alleles we counted) / (2*N)

in other words, it would be a fraction between 0 and 1.

OP is asking about the regions of the genome this fraction has changed very rapidly or is currently changing rapidly, which generally indicates the impact of natural selection.

askscience 内の Deathsmith8 によるリンク What allele frequency is changing fastest in the human population?

[–]jjberg2 13ポイント14ポイント  (0子コメント)

but this is a separate issue from detecting allele frequency change

I think I sort of disagree? If the issue is merely to detect the existence of allele frequency change, then yes, it is completely pervasive due to genetic drift alone.

OP asked about which regions were experiencing the fastest rates of allele frequency change, which would be regions under positive selection. I realize looking back at my answer that I probably could have laid it out a bit more clearly, but methods for detecting recent positive selection are in fact nothing but methods to detect rapid allele frequency change, as that is the signature of positive selection.

askscience 内の Deathsmith8 によるリンク What allele frequency is changing fastest in the human population?

[–]jjberg2 509ポイント510ポイント  (0子コメント)

edit: I realize I sort of jumped into the deep end here. If you don't know what "allele frequency" means, see here and let me know if you have follow up questions.


Answering the question of what allele frequencies are currently changing the fastest is not necessarily that easy, as human generation times are long enough that it's not that easy to observe it happening in real time.

There have been a number of statistical techniques developed to identify very recent positive selection. Summarizing the literature in a reddit post would be difficult, so I'll try to give just a few highlights. One of the most exciting developments in this field is the recent arrival of so called ancient DNA, or the ability to sequence/genotype individuals who have been dead for thousands of years. There is a paper currently posted on a preprint server which examines the genomes of 83 humans who lived in Europe in the range of 4000-8000 years ago, and compares their genomes to a number of present day populations within Europe. They find just 6 loci that show robust evidence of recent positive selection (i.e. very rapid allele frequency change). Two of them, at genes called SLC24A5 and SLC45A2 are associated with (but not entirely responsible for) differences in skin pigmentation between Africans and European.

Another one, called rs4988235, is largely responsible for the ability of Europeans to continue digesting lactose (i.e. drinking milk) well into adulthood, and has been known of for a while.

Another example is a marker called rs12913832, located near two genes called OCA2 and HERC2, which is in large part responsible for blue eyes and possibly also associated with lighter hair pigmentation (1,2,3)

The other two strong signals found by the ancient DNA studied cited above are in two genes related fatty acid metabolism and circulating vitamin D levels, suggesting possibly adaptation to diet.

These are just regions that have been identified as the strongest signals within the continent of Europe. It's pretty widely recognized at this point that to the extent that positive selection has had any impact on recent human evolution (and it's not all that clear that the effects have been that major), the effects differ from one region to the next.

I won't give a whole rundown, as that would make this even more ridiculously long (and because Europe is, predictably, the best studied region for this question), but for example populations of Tibetan highlanders appear to have undergone very recent adaptation in a region of their genome which allows them to better tolerate the thin atmospheres they live in, and the it appears that the allele that they are using to do so actually came from ancient interbreeding with an archaic group of now extinct humans called Denisovans, who are more closely related to Neanderthals that they are to us.

In Africa, for example, there has also (in some regions but not in others) apparently been strong selection for a number of alleles which allow their carriers to digest milk into adulthood, but the alleles that have been targeted by selection in Africa are different than the ones that have been targeted in Europe.

edited to add: It should be emphasized, however, that it maybe the case that none of these regions are any longer experiencing strong natural selection, and therefore may not be changing very fast in frequency "right now". I would expect, however, that we will see studies within the next few years that sequence/genotype large numbers of individuals spanning multiple generations of presently living individuals and try to identify regions which are currently the target of natural selection. Whether or not we will find anything interesting doing this remains to be seen.

probabilitytheory 内の Kior_ によるリンク Interesting question: What is the probability the other one is a boy that born on Tuesday or Wednesday?

[–]jjberg2 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

but that we both understood the mathematics

That seems uncalled for.

Anyways, the difference is that step 3 is written either:

Ask the person if they have either two boys born on Tuesday, or a boy born on Tuesday and a boy born on Wednesday.

OR

Ask the person to think of whichever child they were not thinking of when they answered affirmatively in step 2 and ask whether that child is a boy born on Tuesday or Wednesday.

probabilitytheory 内の Kior_ によるリンク Interesting question: What is the probability the other one is a boy that born on Tuesday or Wednesday?

[–]jjberg2 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

But that's not what the question, as written, asks. The question isn't about the joint probability of the two children, it's about the conditional probability of one of them ("the other one"), given our knowledge about the second one ("the boy born on Tuesday").

probabilitytheory 内の Kior_ によるリンク Interesting question: What is the probability the other one is a boy that born on Tuesday or Wednesday?

[–]jjberg2 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

To be honest, I just don't see any ambiguity in the question here. We know that there is a boy born on Tuesday, and we are asked about a child who is not that one.

probabilitytheory 内の Kior_ によるリンク Interesting question: What is the probability the other one is a boy that born on Tuesday or Wednesday?

[–]jjberg2 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

I agree with /u/shaggorama

At least one child is a boy, and we know that he was born on Tuesday. The other child is a boy or a girl with equal probability, and is born on either Tuesday or Wednesday with probability 2/7, so the final probability is 1/7.

Given the constraint that at least one child is a boy, and conditional on the knowledge that one child is a boy and born on Tuesday, the birthday and sex of the other child is independent of the birthday and sex of the other.

If, however we were given information that one of the children was a girl born on a Tuesday, then given the knowledge that the family has at least one boy, the probability would be 2/7, because that child would have to be a boy.

genetics 内の burtzev によるリンク Individuality as a genetic trait - Animal copies reveal the roots of individuality

[–]jjberg2 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

Bet-hedging

Yeah, the work is all very good and interesting, but I have to roll my eyes a little bit whenever someone suggests that the idea of variation itself as a trait of evolutionary interest is somehow novel or previously overlooked.

askscience 内の Kra_gl_e によるリンク Let's say a man refuses to provide his DNA for a paternity test. Could the son still figure out paternity by testing his siblings' DNA?

[–]jjberg2 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

One.

Assuming you had good genome-wide coverage (this doesn't mean full genome sequence, you'd just need to measure a few thousand or so markers evenly distributed throughout the genome, although we've now reached the point where sequencing wouldn't be that expensive to do), siblings are super easy to spot in genetic data.

Of course, it does not necessarily follow that the individual believed to be the father of one child is the father of the other just because they are siblings. Perhaps neither is.