Genetic adaptation to high altitude in the Ethiopian highlands
By L. Scheinfeldt, S. Soi, Simon Thompson, A. Ranciaro, Dawit Woldemeskel, William Beggs, Charla Lambert, J. Jarvis, D. Abate, G. Belay and 1 more. 2012
311 citations recorded by the source corpus.
BackgroundGenomic analysis of high-altitude populations residing in the Andes and Tibet has revealed several candidate loci for involvement in high-altitude adaptation, a subset of which have also been shown to be associated with hemoglobin levels, including EPAS1, EGLN1, and PPARA, which play a role in the HIF-1 pathway. Here, we have extended this work to high- and low-altitude populations living in Ethiopia, for which we have measured hemoglobin levels. We genotyped the Illumina 1M SNP array and employed several genome-wide scans for selection and targeted association with hemoglobin levels to identify genes that play a role in adaptation to high altitude.ResultsWe have identified a set of candidate genes for positive selection in our high-altitude population sample, demonstrated significantly different hemoglobin levels between high- and low-altitude Ethiopians and have identified a subset of candidate genes for selection, several of which also show suggestive associations with hemoglobin levels.ConclusionsWe highlight several candidate genes for involvement in high-altitude adaptation in Ethiopia, including CBARA1, VAV3, ARNT2 and THRB. Although most of these genes have not been identified in previous studies of high-altitude Tibetan or Andean population samples, two of these genes (THRB and ARNT2) play a role in the HIF-1 pathway, a pathway implicated in previous work reported in Tibetan and Andean studies. These combined results suggest that adaptation to high altitude arose independently due to convergent evolution in high-altitude Amhara populations in Ethiopia.
Subfields: Genetics
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Citations in the corpus
- Robust Identification of Local Adaptation from Allele Frequencies (2012, background): “For example, high altitude adaptation seems to have a different genetic basis in highland Ethiopian and Andean populations (Bigham et al., 2010; Scheinfeldt et al., 2012).”
- The Next-Generation Sequencing Revolution and Its Impact on Genomics (2013, unknown): “…traits (Berndt et al., 2013), targets of natural selection such as variants associated with high-altitude adaptation (Bigham et al., 2009, 2010; Scheinfeldt et al., 2012), and some complex diseases such as Crohn's disease (Yamazaki et al., 2005) and age-related macular degeneration (Klein et…”