ArticleNature ecology & evolution2019
Natural selection contributed to immunological differences between hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers.
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Who cites it
31 citing papers in PubMed.
- Present-day Admixed Genomes Reveal Prehistoric Adaptation to Cold, Maritime Diet, and Local Pathogens in Patagonia.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Accelerated Evolution of Context-Dependent Gene Expression in Primate Immune Cells.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Divergent biological consequences of APOE isoforms across industrialized and non-industrial environments.PLoS genetics · 2026Article
- iDCF: Interpretable deconvolution of cell fractions via biologically-informed deep learning using scRNA-seq data.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Transcription-based identification of uncharacterized genes in the human immune response.European journal of human genetics : EJHG · 2026Article
- Archaic Introgression Shapes Genetic Variation at Loci Associated With DNA Virus Load in Modern Humans.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Divergent Biological Consequences of APOE Isoforms Across Industrialized and Non-Industrial Environments.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Identifying Social-Epidemiological Roles Associated with Viral Exposure Using Regular Equivalence Blockmodeling.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- An interpretable and adaptive autoencoder for efficient tissue deconvolution.Nucleic acids research · 2025Article
- Urbanization exacerbates age-associated declines in cardiometabolic health in Turkana and Orang Asli.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Local genetic adaptation to habitat in wild chimpanzees.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Local genetic adaptation to habitat in wild chimpanzees.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- DISSECT: deep semi-supervised consistency regularization for accurate cell type fraction and gene expression estimation.Genome biology · 2024Article
- Investigating the Influence ofGenes · 2024Article
- Epigenetic variation impacts individual differences in the transcriptional response to influenza infection.Nature genetics · 2024Article
- Article
- DNA methylation-environment interactions in the human genome.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Evolutionary immuno-genetics of endoplasmic reticulum aminopeptidase II (ERAP2).Genes and immunity · 2023Review
- Characterizing the landscape of gene expression variance in humans.PLoS genetics · 2023Article
- Ecoimmunology in the field: Measuring multiple dimensions of immune function with minimally invasive, field-adapted techniques.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2022Review
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15 authors.
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Abstract
The shift from a hunter-gatherer to an agricultural mode of subsistence is believed to have been associated with profound changes in the burden and diversity of pathogens across human populations. Yet, the extent to which the advent of agriculture affected the evolution of the human immune system remains unknown. Here we present a comparative study of variation in the transcriptional responses of peripheral blood mononuclear cells to bacterial and viral stimuli between Batwa rainforest hunter-gatherers and Bakiga agriculturalists from Uganda. We observed increased divergence between hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists in the early transcriptional response to viruses compared with that for bacterial stimuli. We demonstrate that a significant fraction of these transcriptional differences are under genetic control and we show that positive natural selection has helped to shape population differences in immune regulation. Across the set of genetic variants underlying inter-population immune-response differences, however, the signatures of positive selection were disproportionately observed in the rainforest hunter-gatherers. This result is counter to expectations on the basis of the popularized notion that shifts in pathogen exposure due to the advent of agriculture imposed radically heightened selective pressures in agriculturalist populations.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.