Monthly Archives: January 2014

Weekly News Digest January 2, 2014 In addition to this week's NewsBreak(s), the editors have compiled the Weekly News Digest, featuring stories from the week just past that you should know about. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today.

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Nature Publishing Group Announces OA Journal

Human Genome Variation, the sixth journal collaboration between NPG and JSHG, is a sister title of JSHGs Journal of Human Genetics. Katsushi Tokunaga, a professor at the University of Tokyo, will serve as editor-in-chief. The journal will feature original research articles, summaries, reviews, and data reports. Its audience is human genetics researchers and clinical geneticists.

The journal will provide a forum for scientists working in human genetics, variation and mutation to publish their discoveries, results, analysis and insights, says Dugald McGlashan, publisher of NPGs Asia-Pacific academic journals.

Authors may choose which Creative Commons license to apply to their research articles, which will be OA on publication.

NPG and JSHG will also develop a searchable database sourced from the journals data reports that includes content on genomic variation and variability.

Source: Nature Publishing Group

Originally posted here:
Nature Publishing Group Announces OA Journal

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

9-Jan-2014

Contact: Aileen Sheehy press.office@sanger.ac.uk 44-012-234-92368 Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute

Contrary to a common belief, researchers have shown that genetic regions associated with increased risk of type 2 diabetes were unlikely to have been beneficial to people at stages through human evolution.

Type 2 diabetes is responsible for more than three million deaths each year and this number is increasing steadily. The harmful genetic variants associated with this common disease have not yet been eliminated by natural selection.

To try to explain why this is, geneticists have previously hypothesised that during times of 'feast or famine' throughout human evolution, people who had advantageous or 'thrifty' genes processed food more efficiently. But in the modern developed world with too much food, these same people would be more susceptible to type 2 diabetes.

"This thrifty gene theory is an attractive hypothesis to explain why natural selection hasn't protected us against these harmful variants," says Dr. Yali Xue, lead author of the study from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. "But we find little or no evidence to corroborate this theory."

The team tested this theory by examining 65 genetic regions that were known to increase type 2 diabetes risk, the most detailed study of its kind.

If these harmful variants were beneficial in the past, the team would expect to see a genetic imprint of this in the DNA around the affected regions. Despite major developments in tests for positive selection and a four-fold increase in the number of genetic variants associated with diabetes to work with, they found no such imprint.

"We found evidence for positive selection in only few of the 65 variants and selection favoured the protective and risk alleles for type 2 diabetes in similar proportions," notes Dr. Qasim Ayub, first author from The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, "This is no more than what we would expect to find for a random set of genomic variants."

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Why is type 2 diabetes an increasing problem?

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

9-Jan-2014

Contact: Melissa A. Wilson Sayres mwilsonsayres@berkeley.edu Public Library of Science

Is the male Y chromosome at risk of being lost? Recent work by Dr Wilson Sayres and colleagues at UC Berkeley, published in PLOS Genetics, demonstrates that the genes on the Y chromosome are important: they have probably been maintained by selection. This implies that despite its dwindling size, the Y chromosome will be sticking around.

The human Y chromosome contains 27 unique genes, compared to thousands on other chromosomes. Some mammals have already lost their Y chromosome (despite still having males, females and normal reproduction); this has led some researchers to speculate that the Y chromosome is superfluous.

As the X and Y chromosomes evolved, male-specific genes became fixed on the Y chromosome. Some of these genes were detrimental to females, so the X and Y chromosomes stopped swapping genes. This meant the Y chromosome was no longer able to correct mistakes efficiently and has thus degraded over time.

There is low genetic diversity in the human Y chromosome, and Dr Wilson Sayres and colleagues were able to precisely measure this by comparing variation on a person's Y chromosome with variation on that person's other 22 chromosomes, the X chromosome and the mitochondrial DNA. The researchers then showed that this low genetic diversity cannot be explained solely by a reduction in the number of males passing on their Y chromosome (successfully fathering male offspring). Instead, the low diversity must also result from natural selection, in this case purifying selection (the selective removal of deleterious alleles).

The movements of human populations around the world are tracked by variations in the Y chromosome. The increased understanding provided by this research will improve estimates of humans' evolutionary history.

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The human Y chromosome is not likely to disappear