ArticlePLoS genetics2008
Is mate choice in humans MHC-dependent?
Article in PLoS genetics, 2008. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 63 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
63 citing papers in PubMed.
- Genomewide association study of HLA alloimmunization in previously pregnant blood donors.Transfusion · 2018Trial
- No evidence for disassortative mating based on HLA in a small-scale, endogamous population.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- A comparative evaluation of the role of olfaction in attachment.Animal cognition · 2024Review
- Genetic characteristics of spouse selection based on short tandem repeats in DNA and lunula count on fingertip.Genes and environment : the official journal of the Japanese Environmental Mutagen Society · 2023Article
- Genetic slippage after sex maintains diversity for parasite resistance in a natural host population.Science advances · 2022Article
- Article
- Inbreeding Coefficient and Distance in MHC Genes of Parents as Predictors of Reproductive Success in Domestic Cat.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- Assortative mating and within-spouse pair comparisons.PLoS genetics · 2021Article
- The scent of attraction and the smell of success: crossmodal influences on person perception.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2021Review
- Differential attraction in mosquito-human interactions and implications for disease control.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Hormonal Contraception and Violent Death: The Physiological and Psychological Links.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
- Marriage does not relate to major histocompatibility complex: a genetic analysis based on 3691 couples.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Post-copulatory genetic matchmaking: HLA-dependent effects of cervical mucus on human sperm function.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- No evidence for a relationship between MHC heterozygosity and life history strategy in a sample of North American undergraduates.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Chemical signals from eggs facilitate cryptic female choice in humans.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Interdisciplinary challenges for elucidating human olfactory attractiveness.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Review
- Assortative mating at loci under recent natural selection in humans.Bio Systems · 2020Article
- Multiplicative fitness, rapid haplotype discovery, and fitness decay explain evolution of human MHC.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Genomic evidence for MHC disassortative mating in humans.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Assortative Mating on Ancestry-Variant Traits in Admixed Latin American Populations.Frontiers in genetics · 2019Article
3 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
In several species, including rodents and fish, it has been shown that the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) influences mating preferences and, in some cases, that this may be mediated by preferences based on body odour. In humans, the picture has been less clear. Several studies have reported a tendency for humans to prefer MHC-dissimilar mates, a sexual selection that would favour the production of MHC-heterozygous offspring, who would be more resistant to pathogens, but these results are unsupported by other studies. Here, we report analyses of genome-wide genotype data (from the HapMap II dataset) and HLA types in African and European American couples to test whether humans tend to choose MHC-dissimilar mates. In order to distinguish MHC-specific effects from genome-wide effects, the pattern of similarity in the MHC region is compared to the pattern in the rest of the genome. African spouses show no significant pattern of similarity/dissimilarity across the MHC region (relatedness coefficient, R = 0.015, p = 0.23), whereas across the genome, they are more similar than random pairs of individuals (genome-wide R = 0.00185, p<10(-3)). We discuss several explanations for these observations, including demographic effects. On the other hand, the sampled European American couples are significantly more MHC-dissimilar than random pairs of individuals (R = -0.043, p = 0.015), and this pattern of dissimilarity is extreme when compared to the rest of the genome, both globally (genome-wide R = -0.00016, p = 0.739) and when broken into windows having the same length and recombination rate as the MHC (only nine genomic regions exhibit a higher level of genetic dissimilarity between spouses than does the MHC). This study thus supports the hypothesis that the MHC influences mate choice in some human populations.
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