Ancient Fennoscandian genomes reveal origin and spread of Siberian ancestry in Europe.

European population history has been shaped by migrations of people, and their subsequent admixture. Recently, ancient DNA has brought new insights into European migration events linked to the advent of agriculture, and possibly to the spread of Indo-European languages. However, little is known about the ancient population history of north-eastern Europe, in particular about populations speaking Uralic languages, such as Finns and Saami. Here we analyse ancient genomic data from 11 individuals from Finland and north-western Russia. We show that the genetic makeup of northern Europe was shaped by migrations from Siberia that began at least 3500 years ago. This Siberian ancestry was subsequently admixed into many modern populations in the region, particularly into populations speaking Uralic languages today. Additionally, we show that ancestors of modern Saami inhabited a larger territory during the Iron Age, which adds to the historical and linguistic information about the population history of Finland.

The impact of endogenous content, replicates and pooling on genome capture from faecal samples.

Target-capture approach has improved over the past years, proving to be very efficient tool for selectively sequencing genetic regions of interest. These methods have also allowed the use of noninvasive samples such as faeces (characterized by their low quantity and quality of endogenous DNA) to be used in conservation genomic, evolution and population genetic studies. Here we aim to test different protocols and strategies for exome capture using the Roche SeqCap EZ Developer kit (57.5 Mb). First, we captured a complex pool of DNA libraries. Second, we assessed the influence of using more than one faecal sample, extract and/or library from the same individual, to evaluate its effect on the molecular complexity of the experiment. We validated our experiments with 18 chimpanzee faecal samples collected from two field sites as a part of the Pan African Programme: The Cultured Chimpanzee. Those two field sites are in Kibale National Park, Uganda (N = 9) and Loango National Park, Gabon (N = 9). We demonstrate that at least 16 libraries can be pooled, target enriched through hybridization, and sequenced allowing for the genotyping of 951,949 exome markers for population genetic analyses. Further, we observe that molecule richness, and thus, data acquisition, increase when using multiple libraries from the same extract or multiple extracts from the same sample. Finally, repeated captures significantly decrease the proportion of off-target reads from 34.15% after one capture round to 7.83% after two capture rounds, supporting our conclusion that two rounds of target enrichment are advisable when using complex faecal samples.

Recent Selection Changes in Human Genes under Long-Term Balancing Selection.

Balancing selection is an important evolutionary force that maintains genetic and phenotypic diversity in populations. Most studies in humans have focused on long-standing balancing selection, which persists over long periods of time and is generally shared across populations. But balanced polymorphisms can also promote fast adaptation, especially when the environment changes. To better understand the role of previously balanced alleles in novel adaptations, we analyzed in detail four loci as case examples of this mechanism. These loci show hallmark signatures of long-term balancing selection in African populations, but not in Eurasian populations. The disparity between populations is due to changes in allele frequencies, with intermediate frequency alleles in Africans (likely due to balancing selection) segregating instead at low- or high-derived allele frequency in Eurasia. We explicitly tested the support for different evolutionary models with an approximate Bayesian computation approach and show that the patterns in PKDREJ, SDR39U1, and ZNF473 are best explained by recent changes in selective pressure in certain populations. Specifically, we infer that alleles previously under long-term balancing selection, or alleles linked to them, were recently targeted by positive selection in Eurasian populations. Balancing selection thus likely served as a source of functional alleles that mediated subsequent adaptations to novel environments.

Genetic adaptation to levels of dietary selenium in recent human history.

As humans migrated around the world, they came to inhabit environments that differ widely in the soil levels of certain micronutrients, including selenium (Se). Coupled with cultural variation in dietary practices, these migrations have led to a wide range of Se intake levels in populations around the world. Both excess and deficiency of Se in the diet can have adverse health consequences in humans, with severe Se deficiency resulting in diseases of the bone and heart. Se is required by humans mainly due to its function in selenoproteins, which contain the amino acid selenocysteine as one of their constituent residues. To understand the evolution of the use of this micronutrient in humans, we surveyed the patterns of polymorphism in all selenoprotein genes and genes involved in their regulation in 50 human populations. We find that single nucleotide polymorphisms from populations in Asia, particularly in populations living in the extreme Se-deficient regions of China, have experienced concerted shifts in their allele frequencies. Such differentiation in allele frequencies across genes is not observed in other regions of the world and is not expected under neutral evolution, being better explained by the action of recent positive selection. Thus, recent changes in the use and regulation of Se may harbor the genetic adaptations that helped humans inhabit environments that do not provide adequate levels of Se in the diet.

Long-Term Balancing Selection in LAD1 Maintains a Missense Trans-Species Polymorphism in Humans, Chimpanzees, and Bonobos.

Balancing selection maintains advantageous genetic and phenotypic diversity in populations. When selection acts for long evolutionary periods selected polymorphisms may survive species splits and segregate in present-day populations of different species. Here, we investigate the role of long-term balancing selection in the evolution of protein-coding sequences in the Homo-Pan clade. We sequenced the exome of 20 humans, 20 chimpanzees, and 20 bonobos and detected eight coding trans-species polymorphisms (trSNPs) that are shared among the three species and have segregated for approximately 14 My of independent evolution. Although the majority of these trSNPs were found in three genes of the major histocompatibility locus cluster, we also uncovered one coding trSNP (rs12088790) in the gene LAD1. All these trSNPs show clustering of sequences by allele rather than by species and also exhibit other signatures of long-term balancing selection, such as segregating at intermediate frequency and lying in a locus with high genetic diversity. Here, we focus on the trSNP in LAD1, a gene that encodes for Ladinin-1, a collagenous anchoring filament protein of basement membrane that is responsible for maintaining cohesion at the dermal-epidermal junction; the gene is also an autoantigen responsible for linear IgA disease. This trSNP results in a missense change (Leucine257Proline) and, besides altering the protein sequence, is associated with changes in gene expression of LAD1.

SelenoDB 2.0: annotation of selenoprotein genes in animals and their genetic diversity in humans.

SelenoDB (http://www.selenodb.org) aims to provide high-quality annotations of selenoprotein genes, proteins and SECIS elements. Selenoproteins are proteins that contain the amino acid selenocysteine (Sec) and the first release of the database included annotations for eight species. Since the release of SelenoDB 1.0 many new animal genomes have been sequenced. The annotations of selenoproteins in new genomes usually contain many errors in major databases. For this reason, we have now fully annotated selenoprotein genes in 58 animal genomes. We provide manually curated annotations for human selenoproteins, whereas we use an automatic annotation pipeline to annotate selenoprotein genes in other animal genomes. In addition, we annotate the homologous genes containing cysteine (Cys) instead of Sec. Finally, we have surveyed genetic variation in the annotated genes in humans. We use exon capture and resequencing approaches to identify single-nucleotide polymorphisms in more than 50 human populations around the world. We thus present a detailed view of the genetic divergence of Sec- and Cys-containing genes in animals and their diversity in humans. The addition of these datasets into the second release of the database provides a valuable resource for addressing medical and evolutionary questions in selenium biology.

Complete mitochondrial genome sequence of a Middle Pleistocene cave bear reconstructed from ultrashort DNA fragments.

Although an inverse relationship is expected in ancient DNA samples between the number of surviving DNA fragments and their length, ancient DNA sequencing libraries are strikingly deficient in molecules shorter than 40 bp. We find that a loss of short molecules can occur during DNA extraction and present an improved silica-based extraction protocol that enables their efficient retrieval. In combination with single-stranded DNA library preparation, this method enabled us to reconstruct the mitochondrial genome sequence from a Middle Pleistocene cave bear (Ursus deningeri) bone excavated at Sima de los Huesos in the Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain. Phylogenetic reconstructions indicate that the U. deningeri sequence forms an early diverging sister lineage to all Western European Late Pleistocene cave bears. Our results prove that authentic ancient DNA can be preserved for hundreds of thousand years outside of permafrost. Moreover, the techniques presented enable the retrieval of phylogenetically informative sequences from samples in which virtually all DNA is diminished to fragments shorter than 50 bp.

A draft sequence of the Neandertal genome.

Neandertals, the closest evolutionary relatives of present-day humans, lived in large parts of Europe and western Asia before disappearing 30,000 years ago. We present a draft sequence of the Neandertal genome composed of more than 4 billion nucleotides from three individuals. Comparisons of the Neandertal genome to the genomes of five present-day humans from different parts of the world identify a number of genomic regions that may have been affected by positive selection in ancestral modern humans, including genes involved in metabolism and in cognitive and skeletal development. We show that Neandertals shared more genetic variants with present-day humans in Eurasia than with present-day humans in sub-Saharan Africa, suggesting that gene flow from Neandertals into the ancestors of non-Africans occurred before the divergence of Eurasian groups from each other.

From micrograms to picograms: quantitative PCR reduces the material demands of high-throughput sequencing.

Current efforts to recover the Neandertal and mammoth genomes by 454 DNA sequencing demonstrate the sensitivity of this technology. However, routine 454 sequencing applications still require microgram quantities of initial material. This is due to a lack of effective methods for quantifying 454 sequencing libraries, necessitating expensive and labour-intensive procedures when sequencing ancient DNA and other poor DNA samples. Here we report a 454 sequencing library quantification method based on quantitative PCR that effectively eliminates these limitations. We estimated both the molecule numbers and the fragment size distributions in sequencing libraries derived from Neandertal DNA extracts, SAGE ditags and bonobo genomic DNA, obtaining optimal sequencing yields without performing any titration runs. Using this method, 454 sequencing can routinely be performed from as little as 50 pg of initial material without titration runs, thereby drastically reducing costs while increasing the scope of sample throughput and protocol development on the 454 platform. The method should also apply to Illumina/Solexa and ABI/SOLiD sequencing, and should therefore help to widen the accessibility of all three platforms.