ArticleGenetics1990
Allelic genealogy under overdominant and frequency-dependent selection and polymorphism of major histocompatibility complex loci.
Article in Genetics, 1990. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 252 papers.
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Who cites it
252 citing papers in PubMed, 691 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Immunological Determinants of Oncogenic Virus-Driven Cancers in Africa: Mechanisms, Co-Infections and Public Health Challenges.Pathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Local negative frequency dependence can decrease global coexistence in fragmented populations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Twenty years of tuberculosis-driven selection shaped the evolution of the meerkat major histocompatibility complex.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Inbreeding does not reduce major histocompatibility complex diversity in the banded mongoose.BMC ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Joint Effects of Balancing Selection and Population Bottlenecks on the Evolution of a Regulatory Region of Human Antiviral APOBEC3.Genome biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Haplotype analysis reveals pleiotropic disease associations in the HLA region.American journal of human genetics · 2025Article
- Increased heterozygosity and balancing selection in isofemale generations of Anopheles stephensi under laboratory conditions.BMC genomics · 2025Article
- High resolution class I HLA-A, -B, and -C diversity in Eastern and Southern African populations.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The long and short of hyperdivergent regions.Trends in genetics : TIG · 2025Review
- MHC Diversity Across Time and Space.Ecology and evolution · 2025Review
- Article
- HLA Genetic Diversity and Chronic Hepatitis B Virus Infection: Effect of Heterozygosity Advantage.Medical sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Haplotype Analysis Reveals Pleiotropic Disease Associations in the HLA Region.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2024Article
- Only rare classical MHC-I alleles are highly expressed in the European house sparrow.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- het-B allorecognition in Podospora anserina is determined by pseudo-allelic interaction of genes encoding a HET and lectin fold domain protein and a PII-like protein.PLoS genetics · 2024Article
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- Partial molecular characterization, expression pattern and polymorphism analysis of MHC I genes in Chinese domestic goose (Anser cygnoides).Genetics and molecular biology · 2024Article
- Article
192 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
To explain the long-term persistence of polymorphic alleles (trans-specific polymorphism) at the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) loci in rodents and primates, a computer simulation study was conducted about the coalescence time of different alleles sampled under various forms of selection. At the same time, average heterozygosity, the number of alleles in a sample, and the rate of codon substitution were examined to explain the mechanism of maintenance of polymorphism at the MHC loci. The results obtained are as follows. (1) The coalescence time for neutral alleles is too short to explain the trans-specific polymorphism at the MHC loci. (2) Under overdominant selection, the coalescence time can be tens of millions of years, depending on the parameter values used. The average heterozygosity and the number of alleles observed are also high enough to explain MHC polymorphism. (3) The pathogen adaptation model proposed by Snell is incapable of explaining MHC polymorphism, since the coalescence time for this model is too short and the expected heterozygosity and the expected number of alleles are too small. (4) From the mathematical point of view, the minority advantage model of frequency-dependent selection is capable of explaining a high degree of polymorphism and trans-specific polymorphism. (5) The molecular mimicry hypothesis also gives a sufficiently long coalescence time when the mutation rate is low in the host but very high in the parasite. However, the expected heterozygosity and the expected number of alleles tend to be too small. (6) Consideration of the molecular mechanism of the function of MHC molecules and other biological observations suggest that the most important factor for the maintenance of MHC polymorphism is overdominant selection. However, some experiments are necessary to distinguish between the overdominance and frequency-dependent selection hypotheses.
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