Publications related to Genetic history of Europe

Neural ADMIXTURE for rapid genomic clustering

Characterizing the genetic structure of large cohorts has become increasingly important as genetic studies extend to massive, increasingly diverse biobanks. Popular methods decompose individual genomes into fractional cluster assignments with each cluster ...

SPRINGERNATURE2023

Identifying genetic and dietary modulators of metabolic disorders using systems genetics

Xiaoxu Li

Long-term consumption of lipid-rich foods can contribute to common metabolic diseases and systemic low-grade inflammation. However, dietary responses and the development of non-communicable diseases are shaped by genetic factors and gene-by-environment int ...

EPFL2023

Rapid transformation of wildfire emissions to harmful background aerosol

Athanasios Nenes, Spyros Pandis

Wildfires are a significant source of organic aerosol during summer, with major impacts on air quality and climate. However, studies in Europe suggest a surprisingly low (less than 10%) contribution of biomass burning organic aerosol to average summertime ...

Nature Portfolio2023

Archetypal Analysis for population genetics

Albert Dominguez Mantes

The estimation of genetic clusters using genomic data has application from genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to demographic history to polygenic risk scores (PRS) and is expected to play an important role in the analyses of increasingly diverse, large ...

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE2022

Genomic consequences of colonisation, migration and genetic drift in barn owl insular populations of the eastern Mediterranean

Nicolas Jean Philippe Guex, Eléonore Lavanchy

The study of insular populations was key in the development of evolutionary theory. The successful colonisation of an island depends on the geographic context, and specific characteristics of the organism and the island, but also on stochastic processes. A ...

2022

The SNP-Based Profiling of Montecristo Feral Goat Populations Reveals a History of Isolation, Bottlenecks, and the Effects of Management

Elia Vajana

The Montecristo wild goat is an endangered feral population that has been on the homonymous island in the Tuscan Archipelago since ancient times. The origins of Montecristo goats are still debated, with authors dating their introduction either back to Neol ...

MDPI2022

Using population-specific add-on polymorphisms to improve genotype imputation in underrepresented populations

Jacques Fellay, Zhi Ming Xu, Sina Rüeger

Genome-wide association studies rely on the statistical inference of untyped variants, called imputation, to increase the coverage of genotyping arrays. However, the results are often suboptimal in populations underrepresented in existing reference panels ...

Public Library Science2022

Unexpected post‐glacial colonisation route explains the white colour of barn owls ( Tyto alba ) from the British Isles

Nicolas Jean Philippe Guex, Christian Iseli

The climate fluctuations of the Quaternary shaped the movement of species in and out of glacial refugia. In Europe, the majority of species followed one of the described traditional postglacial recolonization routes from the southern peninsulas towards the ...

2022

Population structure and signals of local adaptation in Eugenia uniflora (Myrtaceae), a widely distributed species in the Atlantic Forest

Elia Vajana

Evolutionary diversity in species can arise in many ways, including local adaptation. Despite the global importance of tropical forest ecosystems, few studies have explored patterns of local adaptation in tropical tree species. We investigated population g ...

OXFORD UNIV PRESS2022

Bubble-enhanced ultrasonic microfluidic chip for rapid DNA fragmentation

Martinus Gijs, Thomas Lehnert, Lin Sun

DNA fragmentation is an essential process in developing genetic sequencing strategies, genetic research, as well as for the diagnosis of diseases with a genetic signature like cancer. Efficient on-chip DNA fragmentation protocols would be beneficial to pro ...

ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY2022

The interplay between human genetic variation, chronic inflammation and persistent infection: relevance for cardiovascular morbidity

Flavia Aurelia Shoko Hodel

Contemporary genomic approaches allow us to seek answers to biological questions that were previously out of reach. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous genetic polymorphisms associated with human diseases, providing new insight ...

EPFL2022

Variability of Primary Sjogren's Syndrome Is Driven by Interferon alpha and Interferon alpha Blood Levels Are Associated With the Class II HLA-DQ Locus

Jacques Fellay, Christian Axel Wandall Thorball, Nicolas Meyer

Objective Primary Sjogren's syndrome (SS) is the second most frequent systemic autoimmune disease, affecting 0.1% of the general population. To characterize the molecular and clinical variabilities among patients with primary SS, we integrated transcriptom ...

WILEY2022

Genetic signatures of divergent selection in European beech (Fagus sylvatica L.) are associated with the variation in temperature and precipitation across its distribution range

Elia Vajana

High genetic variation and extensive gene flow may help forest trees with adapting to ongoing climate change, yet the genetic bases underlying their adaptive potential remain largely unknown. We investigated range-wide patterns of potentially adaptive gene ...

WILEY2021

Mycobacterium leprae diversity and population dynamics in medieval Europe from novel ancient genomes

Stewart Cole, Charlotte Avanzi, Philippe Busso

Background Hansen's disease (leprosy), widespread in medieval Europe, is today mainly prevalent in tropical and subtropical regions with around 200,000 new cases reported annually. Despite its long history and appearance in historical records, its origins ...

BMC2021

The genetic architecture of complex human traits at the dawn of genomic medicine

Olivier Noël Marie Naret

The focus of the work presented in this thesis is the exploration of the genetic architecture of complex human traits - at the dawn of genomic medicine. The underlying mechanisms explaining the enormously polygenic nature of most human complex traits are ...

EPFL2021

Polygenic modelling of treatment effect heterogeneity

Zhi Ming Xu

Mendelian randomization is the use of genetic variants to assess the effect of intervening on a risk factor using observational data. We consider the scenario in which there is a pharmacomimetic (i.e., treatment-mimicking) genetic variant that can be used ...

2020

Multi-omics reveals abundant mitochondrial genomic and circadian expression variation in the Drosophila Genetic Reference Panel

Maria Litovchenko

Modern biology rapidly generates a wealth of data,which can only be analysed computationally.Despite the variety of available data types,most of them aim to provide an answer to one question: how does genotypic diversity translates into phenotypes? This qu ...

EPFL2020

The population genetics of crypsis in vertebrates: recent insights from mice, hares, and lizards

Jeffrey David Jensen, Kristen Kay Irwin, Susanne Petra Pfeifer, Stefan Jean Laurent

By combining well-established population genetic theory with high-throughput sequencing data from natural populations, major strides have recently been made in understanding how, why, and when vertebrate populations evolve crypsis. Here, we focus on backgr ...

NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP2020

A Global-Local Approach For Detecting Hotspots In Multiple-Response Regression

Anthony Christopher Davison, Hélène Ruffieux, Jörg Hager

We tackle modelling and inference for variable selection in regression problems with many predictors and many responses. We focus on detecting hotspots, that is, predictors associated with several responses. Such a task is critical in statistical genetics, ...

INST MATHEMATICAL STATISTICS2020

Susceptibility to infection in early life: a growing role for human genetics

Jacques Fellay, Alessandro Borghesi

The unique vulnerability to infection of newborns and young infants is generally explained by a constellation of differences between early-life immune responses and immune responses at later ages, often referred to as neonatal immune immaturity. This devel ...

SPRINGER2020