Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: Evidence of interbreeding between archaic hominins and humans comes from methods that infer the locations of segments of archaic haplotypes, or 'archaic coverage' using the genomes of people living today. As more estimates of archaic coverage have emerged, it has become clear that most of this coverage is found on the autosomes- very little is retained on chromosome X. Here, we summarize published estimates of archaic coverage on autosomes and chromosome X from extant human samples. We find on average 7 times more archaic coverage on autosomes than chromosome X, and identify broad continental patterns in this ratio: greatest in European samples, and least in South Asian samples. We also perform extensive simulation studies to investigate how the amount of archaic coverage, lengths of coverage, and rates of purging of archaic coverage are affected by sex-bias caused by an unequal sex ratio within the archaic introgressors. Our results generally confirm that, with increasing male sex-bias, less archaic coverage is retained on chromosome X. Ours is the first study to explicitly model such sex-bias and its potential role in creating the dearth of archaic coverage on chromosome X.
Source: PLoS Genetics
Institution: Brown University
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,655
Awards: Predoctoral Training Program in Biological Data Science at Brown University, G3549828030, CAREER: Next-generation inference of evolutionary paramaters from genome-wide sequence data, G6671297155, Novel statistical methods to localize genomic elements underlying adaptive evolution, Characterizing modes of natural selection via diverse ancient and modern samples, Population-genetic methods for inferring recent histories and targets of selection in the biobank era
OpenAlex ID: W4385802115