Journal
MOLECULAR BIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
Volume 35, Issue 9, Pages 2272-2283Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/molbev/msy136
Keywords
KITLG; Darwinian positive selection; skin pigmentation; winter temperature; pleiotropic effect; genetic adaptation; Eurasian
Funding
- Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences [XDB13010000]
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [31601016, 31371268, 91631307, 31571370, 91631106]
- Science and technology project of Yunnan Province [2017FD092]
- scientific research project of Yunnan Provincial Department of Education [2017ZZX140]
- Personnel Training Project of Yunnan Province [KKSY201526061]
- State Key Laboratory of Genetic Resources and Evolution grant [GREKF15-06]
- One Hundred Talents Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Human skin color diversity is considered an adaptation to environmental conditions such as UV radiation. Investigations into the genetic bases of such adaptation have identified a group of pigmentation genes contributing to skin color diversity in African and non-African populations. Here, we present a population analysis of the pigmentation gene KITLG with previously reported signal of Darwinian positive selection in both European and East Asian populations. We demonstrated that there had been recurrent selective events in the upstream and the downstream regions of KITLG in Eurasian populations. More importantly, besides the expected selection on the KITLG variants favoring light skin in coping with the weak UV radiation at high latitude, we observed a KITLG variant showing adaptation to winter temperature. In particular, compared with UV radiation, winter temperature showed a much stronger correlation with the prevalence of the presumably adaptive KITLG allele in Asian populations. This observation was further supported by the in vitro functional test at low temperature. Consequently, the pleiotropic effects of KITLG, that is, pigmentation and thermogenesis were both targeted by natural selection that acted on different KITLG sequence variants, contributing to the adaptation of Eurasians to both UV radiation and winter temperature at high latitude areas.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available