Gene Once Beneficial to Human May Also Become Harmful to Health

Source from: Science Daily

A recent research reported that a genetic variant of ancient gene discovered in individuals living in the Arctic , which most likely provided an evolutionary advantage for processing high-fat diets or for surviving in a cold environment in past, however also seems to increase the risk of hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar, and infant mortality in today's northern populations.

The finding was published online at October 23 in Cell Press's American Journal of Human Genetics. It serves as an example to show us that how an initially beneficial genetic change could be detrimental to future generations.

A senior author Dr. Toomas Kivisild from the University of Cambridge said that their work discovered a case in which the same variant once had likely been selectively advantageous in the past could become disadvantageous under current environmental conditions.

Dr. Kivisild and his colleagues firstly analyzed the genomes collected from 25 individuals from Northern Siberia. Then they compared these gene sequences of arctic people with those from 25 people from Europe and 11 from East Asia.

The team successfully identified a variant of gene that was unique to Northern Siberians and was located within CPT1A, a gene that encodes an enzyme involved in the digestion of long fatty acids, which are prevalent in meat-based diets.

Agriculture is unsustainable in Arctic regions because of the extremely cold environment. Therefore coastal populations there have historically fed mostly on marine mammals. They believed this variant of gene must have something to do with those arctic people’s digest system.

However, their later survey showed that the high frequency of this variant in these populations had been proved to be harmful to people’s health. When the investigators looked at the global distribution of the CPT1A variant, they found that it was present in 68% of individuals in the Northern Siberian population and had not been found in other publicly available genomes. Surprisingly, they also found that the variant had previously been linked to high infant mortality and hypoglycemia in Canadian Inuits.

This study results show people the importance to see things from the perspective of development and for scientists, they also need to have an evolutionary understanding of past and then to better explain the present.

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