ArticleeLife2024
Heterozygote advantage can explain the extraordinary diversity of immune genes.
Article in eLife, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Beyond two alleles: multiallelic genotypic selection and its estimation from time-series data.BMC genomics · 2026Article
- Article
- Heterozygote advantage cannot explain MHC diversity, but MHC diversity can explain heterozygote advantage.eLife · 2026Article
- Nonclassical MHC-I Molecules: Emerging Therapeutic Targets in Next-Generation Immunotherapy.MedComm · 2026Review
- Genetic Diversity Analysis of 11Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Article
- Genetic Polymorphism RevealsAnimals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Article
- Joint estimation of selection intensity and mutation rate under balancing selection with applications to HLA.Genetics · 2022Article
- Genomic patterns of homozygosity and inbreeding depression in Murciano-Granadina goats.Journal of animal science and biotechnology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The majority of highly polymorphic genes are related to immune functions and with over 100 alleles within a population, genes of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) are the most polymorphic loci in vertebrates. How such extraordinary polymorphism arose and is maintained is controversial. One possibility is heterozygote advantage (HA), which can in principle maintain any number of alleles, but biologically explicit models based on this mechanism have so far failed to reliably predict the coexistence of significantly more than 10 alleles. We here present an eco-evolutionary model showing that evolution can result in the emergence and maintenance of more than 100 alleles under HA if the following two assumptions are fulfilled: first, pathogens are lethal in the absence of an appropriate immune defence; second, the effect of pathogens depends on host condition, with hosts in poorer condition being affected more strongly. Thus, our results show that HA can be a more potent force in explaining the extraordinary polymorphism found at MHC loci than currently recognised.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.