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Saccharomyces cerevisiae
Published in Dongyou Liu, Handbook of Foodborne Diseases, 2018
Brunella Posteraro, Gianluigi Quaranta, Patrizia Posteraro, Maurizio Sanguinetti
However, it should be noted that the reference laboratory strain represents only a subset of the many aspects of S. cerevisiae's natural life. Paradoxically, very little is known about the S. cerevisiae life cycle in natural settings, and what little it does know is indirectly inferred from studying its life cycle in the laboratory,23 which precludes any firm conclusions.30 Nevertheless, recent population genomics studies of wild and domesticated lineages, coupled with intensive field surveys, have offered the opportunity for elucidating the natural history of this species,21 in addition to pinpointing hybridization, introgression, and high phenotypic diversity as signatures of domestication.30
Managing otherness
Published in Shirley Sun, Socio-economics of Personalized Medicine in Asia, 2016
An example of this is the UGT1A1 gene and its variants, which are linked to drug toxicity with regard to Irinotecan. The authors of “Pharmacogenetic Risk for Adverse Reactions to Irinotecan in the Major Ethnic Populations of Singapore” state: [F]or genetic polymorphisms known to alter drug effect or safety, regulatory authorities can tap into population genomic databases and other sources of allele and genotype distribution data to make a more informed decision about the anticipated impact of such variants on the main ethnic groups in a country’s population.(Sung et al., 2011:1167)
Environments of Health and Disease in Tropical Africa before the Colonial Era
Published in Lori Jones, Disease and the Environment in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds, 2022
As opposed to East African species that might have been exposed to pathogens circulating in the context of the Justinianic Plague (Green 2018, 13–14), West African rodents had little or no previous interaction with Y. pestis and, therefore, would not have been selected against the bacillus. This would have had consequences for the history of plague in West Africa. The arrival and the rapid spread of the pathogen among populations of rodents sensitive to the disease would have caused mass mortality events among them, creating a population bottleneck. This scenario will be confirmed or dismissed by future studies in population genomics of West African rodents. It would also have weakened native rodent infrastructures, opening new opportunities for invasive species such as Rattus rattus and Rattus norvegicus (Norwegian rat) to take advantage of the opening of the Atlantic trade to occupy new niches in West Africa (Etougbétché et al. 2020; Puckett et al. 2016). In the absence of a long-term reservoir in which the pathogen could subsist until a demographic rebound occurred among rodent populations and enabled a subsequent spillover, the collapse of the original rodent infrastructure would have meant that the circulation of the disease was a brutal but relatively brief experience for West African societies. As such, it might not have been characterized by the multiple, long-term epidemic waves over several centuries that have been documented in other parts of the world. If recurrent waves did occur, they must have had a limited geographical impact, since we only have limited evidence for plague-like diseases during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when internal written sources become more common (Chouin 2018, 22–23).
Is It Just for a Screening Program to Give People All the Information They Want?
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2023
Lisa Dive, Isabella Holmes, Ainsley J. Newson
There is a nascent literature that considers some of the practicalities and ethical issues that will arise in population genomic screening. By “population screening” we mean a public health intervention in which members of a target population (such as people of reproductive age) are offered the same test, and—if they agree to be screened—are subject to the same result generation pathway and the same test processes—there is no individual tailoring of a test offer.1 To this end, a screening test offer is made without individual clinical workup, such as taking a family history. Screening is therefore a form of “filtering” to identify people at risk of a health condition, via an intervention that is aimed at a large population of people who are not previously known to be at risk of that health condition (Juth and Munthe 2011). Screening programs are set up with a defined goal, and their success is considered in terms of meeting that goal.
Genomic diversity and differentiation of Alu insertion polymorphisms in a native British and four South Asian migrant populations
Published in Annals of Human Biology, 2023
Rebekah Beaumont, Liz Akam, Puneetpal Singh, Jasvinder Singh Bhatti, Sarabjit Mastana
This is the first study to analyse a large battery of Alu polymorphisms (39) to assess genetic composition and population relationships among a British White and four migrant South Asian populations in the East Midlands region of the UK. Similarities in allele frequencies in migrant South Asian samples indicated a strong common genetic heritage, ancestry, and differing levels of endogamy. This investigation emphasised the importance of understanding population similarities and differences and the effect of different religious traditions on genetic composition (Laybourn et al. 2016). The results from this study supported those of other Alu and other genetic polymorphisms (STRs, SNPs), demonstrating the significant genetic variation between South Asian subpopulations and British samples. The process of South Asian groups migrating to Europe promotes genetic drift, which reduces the gene pool size and risks the possibility of certain Alus being lost (Wang et al. 1998). Analysed Alus had a high level of discrimination, therefore these could be effective loci in analysing the genetic variation among individuals and populations. Analysis of roughly 50 Alus has been shown to provide the most accurate genetic estimates (Watkins et al. 2003). Many of the loci included in this dataset are widely under-studied. Therefore, more research is needed to address the usefulness of Alus in population genomics.
The expanding Anopheles gambiae species complex
Published in Pathogens and Global Health, 2020
The study of the genomes of mosquito species has important applications, such as identifying genes responsible for vectoral capacity, managing insecticide resistance, and more recently, for predicting the spread of transgenes that may be implemented for malaria control. We may gain more ability to resolve the different processes when we have genomic data from wild-caught samples. So far, availability of population genomic data has mostly been confined to An. gambiae s.s. and An. coluzzii (the Anopheles gambiae 1000 Genomes Project [5]), but sequencing efforts are now expanding to more species and locations. We now have the ability to generate huge amounts of genetic data with falling costs; it is clearly important that capacity is also available for continued and widespread sampling of mosquitoes from wild settings. At the time of writing, there is a report of yet another new species of An. gambiae s.l. from Burkina Faso (D. Neafsey, Personal Communication); it will be intriguing to see what new insights the study of this species will bring.