Evolutionary Genetics of Humans and Other Primates: A Journal Club

Introduction

The eghop journal club no longer meets. This website will stay up for awhile, in case we decide to start things up again in the summer.

Each week, we discuss a recent publication or preprint on the evolutionary genetics of humans or other primates. Everyone is welcome, from anywhere in the world. You need not be affiliated with our University, and there is no fee. Undergraduates are welcome. The only prerequisite is an interest in the subject. The journal club is administered by Alan Rogers and Tim Webster, of the University of Utah.

Participants are expected to treat each other with respect. Anyone who fails to do so will be blocked.

If you'd like to participate, send email to Alan Rogers (rogers@anthro.utah.edu). Unless I know you already, tell me about yourself. I'll send you the Zoom meeting id and password.

Suggested readings

Click here for the list of readings that have been suggested for future meetings of the journal club. Use this link to suggest an article or preprint yourself. We prefer articles that present new findings--either empirical or theoretical. Review papers and methodological papers are less likely to provoke interesting discussions. We'll conduct surveys from time to time to vote on the suggested readings.

History

Click here for a history of past journal club meetings.

Schedule

• Jan 26 Jacobs et al 2019 Multiple deeply divergent Denisovan ancestries in Papuans. Presenter: Alan Rogers.

  • "Modern Papuans carry hundreds of gene variants from two deeply divergent Denisovan lineages that separated over 350 thousand years ago. Spatial and temporal structure among these lineages suggest that introgression from one of these Denisovan groups predominantly took place east of the Wallace line and continued until near the end of the Pleistocene. A third Denisovan lineage occurs in modern East Asians. This regional mosaic suggests considerable complexity in archaic contact, with modern humans interbreeding with multiple Denisovan groups that were geographically isolated from each other over deep evolutionary time."

• Feb 02 Wang et al. 2020 Tracking human population structure through time from whole genome sequences.

  • These authors introduce a new method for inferring the deep history of population size and admixture. Using this method, they "detect traces of extremely deep ancestry between some African populations, with around 1% of ancestry dating to divergences older than a million years ago."

• Feb 09 Vizzari et al 2020 A revised model of anatomically modern human expansions out of Africa through a machine learning approximate Bayesian computation approach.

  • The authors argue that modern humans emigrated out of Africa in two waves, first at 74 kya and later at 46 kya.

• Feb 16 Andirko et al. 2021 Fine-grained temporal mapping of derived high-frequency variants supports the mosaic nature of the evolution of Homo sapiens.

  • These authors summarize published data on the time of origin of high-frequency alleles in several categories: those under positive selection, those introgressed from archaics, and regulatory genes active in the brain. Several of these age distributions are bimodal, with one mode at 300-500 kya.

• Feb 23 Orkin et al 2020 bioRxiv The evolution of ecological flexibility, large brains, and long lives: capuchin monkey genomics revealed with fecalFACS.

  • "We compared genomes of capuchin populations from tropical dry forests and lowland rainforests and identified population divergence in genes involved in water balance, kidney function, and metabolism. Through a comparative genomics approach spanning a wide diversity of mammals, we identified genes under positive selection associated with longevity and brain development."

• Mar 02 Dominguez-Andres et al. 2021 Evolution of cytokine production capacity in ancient and modern European populations. Presenter: Mihai Netea.

  • "We observed that the advent of the Neolithic was a turning point for immune-mediated traits in Europeans, favoring those alleles linked with the development of tolerance against intracellular pathogens and promoting inflammatory responses against extracellular microbes."