Link to bioRxiv paper:
http://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2020.07.27.223628v1?rss=1
Authors: Fox, K., Huerta-Sanchez, E., Villanea, F. A.
Abstract:
Variation at the ABO locus was one of the earliest sources of data in the study of human population identity and history, and to this day remains widely genotyped due to its importance in blood and tissue transfusions. As one of the first genetic markers, variation at the ABO gene has been studied for over 60 years, and yet there are some aspects of its evolution that remain mysterious. Here, we look at ABO blood type variants in our archaic relatives: Neanderthals and Denisovans. Our goal is to understand the genetic landscape of the ABO gene in archaic humans, and how it relates to modern human ABO variation. We analyze coding variation at the ABO locus from next-generation sequences in ~2,500 individuals from 28 populations, including three Neanderthal and one Denisovan individuals. We use the modern human haplotypes to impute ABO genotypes for the four archaic human genomes. We found that the Siberian Neanderthals, Altai and Chagyrskaya, are both homozygous for a derived Neanderthal variant of the O allele, while the European Neanderthal, Vindija, is a heterozygote for two derived Neanderthal variants, an O variant different from Altai and Chagyrskaya, and a rare cis-AB variant. The Denisovan individual is homozygous for an ancestral variant of the O allele, similar to variants found widely in modern humans. Perhaps more surprisingly, the derived O allele variant found in the Altai Neanderthal can be found at low frequencies in modern European and Southeast Asian individuals, and the derived O allele variant found in the Vindija Neanderthal is also found at very low frequency in East Asian individuals. Our genetic distance analyses suggests both alleles were introgressed through Neanderthal-human gene flow. In summary, our study identifies the genetic variation of the ABO gene in archaic humans, we find that ABO allele diversity in Neanderthals was likely high, and that some of these alleles still survive in modern humans due to inbreeding with Neanderthals.
Copy rights belong to original authors. Visit the link for more info