Over 800 new genome regions possibly relevant to human evolution identified
Tuesday, February 5, 2019 - 10:00
in Biology & Nature
A study by the research group Bioinformatics of Genome Diversity at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), published in the journal Nucleic Acids Research, increases by 40% the total number of signals of natural selection detected in the human genome to date. Researchers were able to add a total of 873 new regions of the human genome as firm candidates to have been the target of natural selection at some point, from the emergence of our species to the present. These are in addition to the 1986 regions that had already been detected, providing a very valuable set of data to help answer the question: What makes us humans?