Chapter category: Gene Expression
Distribution and Abundance of Polymorphism in the Malaria Genome
Selective Sweep
Edited by: Dmitry NurminskyISBN: 0-306-48235-5
» Get more information about this book at landesbioscience.com «
Chapter authors:
Stephen M. Rich
Plasmodium falciparum is the most deadly of the four human malaria parasites, causing as many as 500 million malaria cases per year and more than 2 million deaths.1 Despite more than a century of biomedical research and unprecedented (indeed, unsurpassed) measures of international collaboration to eradicate the disease, the situation only seems to be worsening as drug-resistant parasites come to dominate the landscape. Indeed, P. falciparum has demonstrated remarkable adaptive potential in overcoming every effort to thwart its transmission. Novel strategies are currently in development. These include the innovation of new therapeutic modalities,2,3 development of protective vaccines,4-6 and efforts to develop refractory mosquito vectors.7,8 Choosing the most effective means of reducing malaria transmission will require careful consideration of the parasite’s ability to circumvent targeted interventions of its transmission cycle. For example, objective criteria should be established for prioritizing among the 40+ vaccines currently in development and for assessing the sustainability of their protection. Accordingly, it is crucial that we discern the evolutionary processes that have facilitated the persistent association of the parasite and its human host. In short, it is imperative to determine how genetic variation within and among extant P. falciparum population actuates to become the parasites’ adaptive response to vaccine and drug pressures.
Additional chapters from this book:
Rapid Evolution of Sex-related Genes: Sexual Conflict or Sex-specific Adaptations?
Alberto Civetta and Rama S. Singh
A number of recent studies have suggested that the rapid evolution of genes involved in sexual reproduction is driven by conflict between the sexes. Such genes include the ones that have a role in m...
Distribution and Abundance of Polymorphism in the Malaria Genome
Stephen M. Rich
Plasmodium falciparum is the most deadly of the four human malaria parasites, causing as many as 500 million malaria cases per year and more than 2 million deaths.1 Despite more than a century of bi...
Selective Sweeps in Structured Populations-empirical Evidence and Theoretical Studies
Thomas Wiehe, Karl Schmid, Wolfgang Stephan
Properties of most selection models have been explored for panmictic populations, but little work has been done for substructured populations. In a substructured population, background selection aga...
Detecting Hitchhiking from Patterns of DNA Polymorphism
Justin C. Fay and Chung-I Wu
The genetic basis of adaptive evolution has long escaped the grasp of evolutionary geneticists due to the difficulty of mapping an organism’s phenotype to its genotype. However, adaptive substitut...
Selective Sweep in the Evolution of a New Sperm-Specific Gene in Drosophila
Rob J. Kulathinal, Stanley A. Sawyer, Carlos D. Bustamante, Dmitry I. Nurminsky, Rita Ponce, Jos? M. Ranz and Daniel L. Hartl
The Sdic gene cluster at the base of the X-chromosome is unique to the lineage of Drosophila melanogaster. The repeating unit in the cluster was formed from a duplication and fusion of the genes, An...
Inferring Evolutionary History through Interand Intraspecific DNA Sequence Comparison The Drosophila janus and ocnus Genes
John Parsch, Colin D. Meiklejohn and Daniel L. Hartl
Statistical analysis of aligned DNA sequences, both among and within species, has proven to be a valuable tool for inferring the evolutionary history of genetic loci. Of particular interest are case...
Periodic Selection and Ecological Diversity in Bacteria
Frederick M. Cohan
Biodiversity in the bacterial world is strongly influenced by “periodic selection,” in which natural selection recurrently purges diversity within a bacterial population. Owing to the extreme ra...
A Novel Test Statistic for the Identification of Local Selective Sweeps Based on Microsatellite Gene Diversity
Christian Schlotterer and Daniel Dieringer
Genome wide population surveys have recently been established as a promising approach for the identification of genomic regions subject to directional selection. Nevertheless, the analysis of multip...
