ClimAHealth · Assessing the role of climate adaptation on human evolution and its implications for health.
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2021-10-15 → 2025-02-03
- EU contribution
- €263,732
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Assessing the role of climate adaptation on human evolution and its implications for health.
After migrating out of Africa, human populations encountered diverse climates, particularly varying temperatures. Over millennia, this likely acted as a selective pressure, shaping human metabolism and leading to adaptations detectable in the genome as signatures of positive selection. Considering that the mechanisms for coping with temperature changes involve energy production and the use of different energy substrates like glucose or fatty acids, they are closely related to energy balance and cardiometabolic traits. Consequently, past adaptive events that altered the ability of human populations to expend energy in heat production might contribute to differential risk of metabolic disorders between current populations. Conclusions: We developed and applied novel machine learning models to detect adaptation signals, finding a consistent accumulation of them in genes related to thermogenesis in skeletal muscle and brown adipose tissue (SMT and BAT). These signals appeared across populations from four continents, suggesting widespread climate adaptation over the past 30,000 years. Moreover, thermogenic genes showed stronger-than-expected associations with body mass in an independent genome-wide association study (GWAS), suggesting that past climate adaptations may influence present-day cardiometabolic health.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Climate is a key environmental factor and one of the main selective pressures affecting the survival of organisms, including human beings. Human populations were exposed to a wide range of environmental conditions after the migration Out of Africa, which could have shaped the evolution of traits related to metabolism, like thermoregulation. In this project, we will search for signals of selection caused by climate across the human genome to study climate adaptation in our species. We will assess the existence of recent and ancient events of selection using novel approaches that increase the statistical power respect to previous methods and control for many genomic confounding factors that are usually overlooked. We will combine bootstrapping and machine learning methods to this end. This project will focus on the influence of climate in the evolution of traits related to metabolism (thermoregulation in tissues like brown adipose tissue and skeletal muscle). We will also consider the influence of adaptive introgression from archaic humans (e.g. Neanderthals) that human populations encountered during their migrations. Finally, the evolutionary information generated will be used to inform genetic association studies and medical genetics. We will assess the influence of climate adaptation in current health issues by testing the relationship between climate-selected variants and prevalence of non-infectious chronic diseases. Finally, we will propose and test novel candidate genes for these diseases from genomic regions with high signals of climate selection.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSIDAD DE GRANADA · GranadaCoordinatorSpain
- ARIZONA BOARD OF REGENTS · TempeUnited States
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union