Assistant Professor, USC Keck School of Medicine, Center for Genetic Epidemiology, Preventive Medicine
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The impact of demographic history and natural selection on human complex traits: examples from Sardinia and Finland
Thursday, August 29, 2019
2 PM
RRI 101
Abstract: How complex traits change through time is a central question in evolutionary biology and genetics. Two of the major evolutionary forces that shaped the distribution of human complex traits are the demographic and adaptive histories of a population. Therefore, in order for human genetics to provide a compelling context to study complex trait evolution, it is necessary to integrate genetic mapping with a detailed knowledge of population history. A well-known example of demographic impact on complex traits is a population bottleneck followed by long-term isolations. I will use examples from European populations of Sardinia and Finland to illustrate the impact of the demographic history on patterns of genetic variation and human complex traits. By utilizing large-scale whole-genome or whole-exome sequencing datasets, I will describe our findings in delineating the population structure and history of these populations, and how the special population history empowered association studies. Moreover, natural selection through polygenic adaptation is also thought to be an important force in shaping the complex traits of extant populations. Adult height differences across European populations had been thought of as the prime example of polygenic adaptation in humans, until recent papers demonstrated that the differences across Europe might have been over-estimated due to uncorrected biases in genome-wide association studies (GWAS). I will show that by using GWAS summary statistics ascertained from an East Asian population, we continue to see signature consistent with polygenic adaptation at height-associated loci in at least some European populations.
Host: Andrew Smith
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