Jovialis
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This article was shared by Dr. Spencer Wells on Facebook. It discusses how neanderthal admixture impacts the immune system.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/evolution/neanderthal-immune-system
In Montreal, as he was comparing the immune responses of African and European people, Barreiro found that 147 genes in his European samples showed signs of Neanderthal ancestry. But one stood out: the OAS family of genes that fight a variety of viral and bacterial infections. Today, 41% of people of European descent have the Neanderthal version of this family of genes, while the rest have the more common European-specific version. To Barreiro, it was a natural setup for an experiment: By comparing the immune cells from these two groups, he could start to understand how Neanderthal DNA shapes immune responses today...Such work is seeing a very recent surge in activity. Also in late 2016, Quintana-Murci, the population geneticist in Paris, used the detailed genetic maps to focus on PNMA1, a gene that produces a protein that directly interacts with the flu virus. “It’s not only super enriched in Neanderthal ancestry, but it’s present in 33% of Europeans, which is huge for a Neanderthal gene,” he says. Experiments with the virus and immune cells are currently underway to reveal how this relates to active infection, adding another layer to the OAS work in Barreiro’s lab...“If we take all the genes associated with innate immunity—the first line of immune defense—on average, Europeans have a higher degree of Neanderthal ancestry than the remainder of the genome,” says Lluis Quintana-Murci, a population geneticist from the Pasteur Institute in Paris. This goes against the norm, he says: Most Neanderthal DNA was diluted over time. Over 30,000 years since they interbred with humans, their injection of DNA was selected against more often than not. Their genes were detrimental to modern humans. But when it comes to the immune system, large sections of Neanderthal DNA remain largely unchanged today. This makes sense: With a long history in Europe, Neanderthals had plentiful opportunity to prime their bodies to the local bacteria, viruses, and parasites. By interbreeding with them, humans inherited thousands of years of adaptation in an evolutionary blink of an eye.
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