TITLE:
Allelic Frequency in Human SNPs Predicts the Rate of Non-Synonymous Nucleotide Substitutions between Human and Chimpanzee Genes
AUTHORS:
Hippokratis Kiaris, Athanasios G. Papavassiliou
KEYWORDS:
HapMap; Chimpanzee Genome; Human Speciation
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Anthropology,
Vol.4 No.1,
February
19,
2014
ABSTRACT: The combination of comparative genomics and population genetics may
provide important clues regarding human evolution. We have hypothesized that
the divergence between various human and chimpanzee orthologs will be reflected
in the variability of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that are localized
in the vicinity of the corresponding loci in different human populations.
Consistently with this notion, more diverged genes between humans and
chimpanzees are more likely to be associated with human speciation and are
anticipated to contain SNPs with reduced variability between different human
populations. In order to test this hypothesis, we have compared the rate of non
synonymous nucleotide substitutions (Ka) between 255 chimpanzee and human
orthologs with the average deviation in the allelic frequencies of
corresponding closely linked SNPs in two distinct human populations: The Yoruba
people in Ibadan, Nigeria (YRI) and US residents with ancestry from Northern
and Western Europe, collected in 1980 by the Centre d’Etude du Polymorphisme
Humain (CEU). We found a significant (p