SBIDER Calendar
Bridget Penman. “The influence of pathogens on the human genome: malaria and beyond”
The Seminar Speaker this Friday is SLS’ Dr Bridget Penman
DATE: Friday 3 March 2017
LOCATION: GLT2 - Gibbet Hill Campus
TIME: 14.00 to 15.00
SEMINAR TITLE: “The influence of pathogens on the human genome: malaria and beyond”
Infectious diseases generate profound selective pressures on their hosts. Human adaptation to malaria provides us with our best examples of recent human evolution. Diseases other than malaria must surely too have affected the human genome, but it is surprisingly difficult to link known human genetic variation to natural selection from non-malaria pathogens.
I shall first explore some of the outstanding questions in malaria-human coevolution, specifically : (i) why do different populations under malaria selection display different suites of malaria protective haemoglobinopathies?, and (ii) why is the fixation of Duffy negativity limited to sub Saharan Africa? In the second half of the seminar I will consider the HLA genes, which encode a critical part of the human adaptive immune system – and ask what sorts of signatures of pathogen selection they might display.