Taste perception and lifestyle: insights from phenotype and genome data among Africans and Asians.

Taste is essential for the interaction of animals with their food and has co-evolved with diet. Humans have peopled a large range of environments and present a wide range of diets, but little is known about the diversity and evolution of human taste perception. We measured taste recognition thresholds across populations differing in lifestyles (hunter gatherers and farmers from Central Africa, nomad herders, and farmers from Central Asia). We also generated genome-wide genotype data and performed association studies and selection scans in order to link the phenotypic variation in taste sensitivity with genetic variation. We found that hunter gatherers have lower overall sensitivity as well as lower sensitivity to quinine and fructose than their farming neighbors. In parallel, there is strong population divergence in genes associated with tongue morphogenesis and genes involved in the transduction pathway of taste signals in the African populations. We find signals of recent selection in bitter taste-receptor genes for all four populations. Enrichment analysis on association scans for the various tastes confirmed already documented associations and revealed novel GO terms that are good candidates for being involved in taste perception. Our framework permitted us to gain insight into the genetic basis of taste sensitivity variation across populations and lifestyles.

Khoe-San Genomes Reveal Unique Variation and Confirm the Deepest Population Divergence in Homo sapiens.

The southern African indigenous Khoe-San populations harbor the most divergent lineages of all living peoples. Exploring their genomes is key to understanding deep human history. We sequenced 25 full genomes from five Khoe-San populations, revealing many novel variants, that 25% of variants are unique to the Khoe-San, and that the Khoe-San group harbors the greatest level of diversity across the globe. In line with previous studies, we found several gene regions with extreme values in genome-wide scans for selection, potentially caused by natural selection in the lineage leading to Homo sapiens and more recent in time. These gene regions included immunity-, sperm-, brain-, diet-, and muscle-related genes. When accounting for recent admixture, all Khoe-San groups display genetic diversity approaching the levels in other African groups and a reduction in effective population size starting around 100,000 years ago. Hence, all human groups show a reduction in effective population size commencing around the time of the Out-of-Africa migrations, which coincides with changes in the paleoclimate records, changes that potentially impacted all humans at the time.

Private haplotypes can reveal local adaptation.

BACKGROUND: Genome-wide scans for regions that demonstrate deviating patterns of genetic variation have become common approaches for finding genes targeted by selection. Several genomic patterns have been utilized for this purpose, including deviations in haplotype homozygosity, frequency spectra and genetic differentiation between populations. RESULTS: We describe a novel approach based on the Maximum Frequency of Private Haplotypes--MFPH--to search for signals of recent population-specific selection. The MFPH statistic is straightforward to compute for phased SNP- and sequence-data. Using both simulated and empirical data, we show that MFPH can be a powerful statistic to detect recent population-specific selection, that it performs at the same level as other commonly used summary statistics (e.g. FST, iHS and XP-EHH), and that MFPH in some cases capture signals of selection that are missed by other statistics. For instance, in the Maasai, MFPH reveals a strong signal of selection in a region where other investigated statistics fail to pick up a clear signal that contains the genes DOCK3, MAPKAPK3 and CISH. This region has been suggested to affect height in many populations based on phenotype-genotype association studies. It has specifically been suggested to be targeted by selection in Pygmy groups, which are on the opposite end of the human height spectrum compared to the Maasai. CONCLUSIONS: From the analysis of both simulated and publicly available empirical data, we show that MFPH represents a summary statistic that can provide further insight concerning population-specific adaptation.