Outreach + Highlights
The AGP laboratory conducts research on the diversity and biological evolution of human populations, with the main objective of reconstructing the history of world settlement since the origin of Homo sapiens.
The AGP laboratory conducts research on the diversity and biological evolution of human populations, with the main objective of reconstructing the history of world settlement since the origin of Homo sapiens.
The worldwide expansion of modern humans (Homo sapiens) started before the extinction of Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis). This study shows that inferences about past human population dynamics can be made from the spatiotemporal variation in archaic introgression.
In biomedical research, population differences are of central interest. Variations in the frequency and severity of diseases and in treatment effects among human subpopulation groups are common in many medical conditions.
This study investigates mitochondrial diversity in Neolithic Greece and its relation to hunter-gatherers and farmers who populated the Danubian Neolithic expansion axis.
Spatially explicit simulations of population dynamics combined with palaeogenomic data support the cohabitation of pastoralist and agriculturalist populations in Central Europe during the Bronze Age, with limited gene flow between them and a demographic decline after their initial contact.
The main function of HLA class I molecules is to present pathogen-derived peptides to cytotoxic T lymphocytes. This function is assumed to drive the maintenance of an extraordinary amount of polymorphism at each HLA locus, providing an immune advantage to heterozygote individuals capable to present larger repertories of peptides than homozygotes.
UNIGE researchers have demonstrated that every population can protect itself against a broad range of viruses thanks to the two most diverse HLA immune genes in humans.
A dramatic increase in the hybridization between historically allopatric species has been induced by human activities. Our article proposes a novel view of conservation guidelines, in which human-induced hybridization may also be a tool to enhance the likelihood of adaptation to changing environmental conditions or to increase the genetic diversity of taxa affected by inbreeding depression.
Cette hypothèse est avancée dans une étude récente qui a mis en évidence une évolution divergente entre l’humain et le chimpanzé dans une petite famille de gènes impliqués dans la détoxification des molécules produites lors de la combustion de matières organiques.
Hybridization models during range expansion have been developed but assume dispersal to be independent from neighboring population densities.
We present a new spatially explicit computer simulation approach to estimate partial population continuity through time using ancient DNA.