Environmental changes, as well as evolution in cultural habits, are able to substantially affect populations’ allele frequencies: the well know case of selection on lactase persistence (LP) provides a good example for this assumption. Indeed, the process of dairy animal domestication seems to have positively selected different polymorphisms around the LCT gene, which are associated to LP[Enattah et al. 2002]. Several changes in dietary habits took place over human history since the introduction of meat consumption, the Neolithic transition, and the recent shift to an high caloric diet which led to a reversal of our dietary habits [Lindeberg 2012]. These new cultural habits have been established in such a recent time that it didn’t allow genomic adaptation to the new nutritional conditions. The mismatch between how our genome has adapted and the new dietary conditions is potentially at the basis of various common chronic diseases such as obesity, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and cancer [Konner and Eaton 2010]. The interaction between the genome and the nutritional environment is obviously regulated not only by nutrition-related genes, but even by genes which modulate the perception of taste and thermoregulation, which rebalances the relation between temperature and the needed energy resources. According to these evidences, the aim of this study is to analyze, taking advantage from the 1000Genomes project phase I dataset, patterns of genetic variation at a set of genes, which have been selected for their involvement in nutritional processes, taste perception and thermogenesis, and to detect possible signs of selection at the investigated genomic regions. This in silico approach was used to detect the most interesting variants on the basis of their highest heterozygosity values among the examined European sub-populations. These results will subsequently drive experimental analyses of the most polymorphic genes on a Central-Southern Italian sample, collected according to a sampling strategy that takes into account the complex geographical and historical Italian background, as scheduled within the research activities of the EPIC project (PRIN2012).
Genetic variability of genes involved in Nutrition and Thermoregulation processes
QUAGLIARIELLO, ANDREA;DE FANTI, SARA;GIULIANI, CRISTINA;SAZZINI, MARCO;LUISELLI, DONATA
2013
Abstract
Environmental changes, as well as evolution in cultural habits, are able to substantially affect populations’ allele frequencies: the well know case of selection on lactase persistence (LP) provides a good example for this assumption. Indeed, the process of dairy animal domestication seems to have positively selected different polymorphisms around the LCT gene, which are associated to LP[Enattah et al. 2002]. Several changes in dietary habits took place over human history since the introduction of meat consumption, the Neolithic transition, and the recent shift to an high caloric diet which led to a reversal of our dietary habits [Lindeberg 2012]. These new cultural habits have been established in such a recent time that it didn’t allow genomic adaptation to the new nutritional conditions. The mismatch between how our genome has adapted and the new dietary conditions is potentially at the basis of various common chronic diseases such as obesity, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and cancer [Konner and Eaton 2010]. The interaction between the genome and the nutritional environment is obviously regulated not only by nutrition-related genes, but even by genes which modulate the perception of taste and thermoregulation, which rebalances the relation between temperature and the needed energy resources. According to these evidences, the aim of this study is to analyze, taking advantage from the 1000Genomes project phase I dataset, patterns of genetic variation at a set of genes, which have been selected for their involvement in nutritional processes, taste perception and thermogenesis, and to detect possible signs of selection at the investigated genomic regions. This in silico approach was used to detect the most interesting variants on the basis of their highest heterozygosity values among the examined European sub-populations. These results will subsequently drive experimental analyses of the most polymorphic genes on a Central-Southern Italian sample, collected according to a sampling strategy that takes into account the complex geographical and historical Italian background, as scheduled within the research activities of the EPIC project (PRIN2012).I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
