Signatures of archaic adaptive introgression in present-day human populations

摘要: Comparisons of DNA from archaic and modern humans show that these groups interbred, and in some cases received an evolutionary advantage from doing so. This process—adaptive introgression—may lead to a faster rate of adaptation than is predicted from models with mutation and selection alone. Within the last couple of years, a series of studies have identified regions of the genome that are likely examples of adaptive introgression. In many cases, once a region was ascertained as being introgressed, commonly used statistics based on both haplotype as well as allele frequency information were employed to test for positive selection. Introgression by itself, however, changes both the haplotype structure and the distribution of allele frequencies, thus confounding traditional tests for detecting positive selection. Therefore, patterns generated by introgression alone may lead to false inferences of positive …