![](http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2023/2359/320/muscle%20fiber.0.jpg)
The authors find strong evidence of (maybe diversifying) selection in humans on some variants of the Myostatin gene (GDF8), which encodes a negative regulator of skeletal muscle growth. They also find somewhat large differences in frequency of these mutations between sub-Saharan Africans (up to 31%) and rare in others.
The authors don't mention much about the implications of this in terms of adaptation, except for a passing mention that "one of the many possible adaptive implications of such an effect could be protection from muscle-wasting in times of famine, a potentially recurrent phenomenon for early agricultural societies."
This gene falls in a line of other muscle related genes found to have population differences, the main one being ACTN3.
No comments:
Post a Comment