Monday, January 15, 2007

Eur-Afr Gene Expression differences

Check out agnostic's post at GNXP about another paper in AJHG about gene expression differences between Europeans and Africans. They find smaller differences (~17% of genes differentially expressed) between Eur and Afr than the recent study found between Europeans and Asians (23%).

This raises all kinds of questions (although the latest study has a very small sample compared with the Eur-As one) as to what we consider to be the major split in humans. Many studies show that Africans vs. the rest is the major split, but this and other studies have found the major split to be East Asians vs. the rest. I'm thinking mainly here of the Rosenberg et al. paper in Science a few years back where they used STRUCTURE on ~344 microsatellites and find that if K=2, those two pops are East Asians and the rest.

2 comments:

Joe Pickrell said...

they used STRUCTURE on ~344 microsatellites and find that if K=2, those two pops are East Asians and the rest.

when I look at this figure:
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1310579&rendertype=figure&id=pgen-0010070-g002

it doesn't really look like east asians and the rest at K=2. it looks a little like the americas and the rest, but the clusters don't seem too well defined.

Yann Klimentidis said...

yeah,I haven't looked at it in awhile and was obviously exaggerating. it is very much clinal-looking. I guess I was surprised to see that it wasn't Africans vs. the rest.
As you scan down the k=2 image, the major "jumps" are first for the east Asians, then for the Americans, and not really between the Europeans and the Africans.

 
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