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Adaptation of human skin color in various populations

BACKGROUND: Skin color is a well-recognized adaptive trait and has been studied extensively in humans. Understanding the genetic basis of adaptation of skin color in various populations has many implications in human evolution and medicine. DISCUSSION: Impressive progress has been made recently to i...

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Autores principales: Deng, Lian, Xu, Shuhua
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5502412/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28701907
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s41065-017-0036-2
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author Deng, Lian
Xu, Shuhua
author_facet Deng, Lian
Xu, Shuhua
author_sort Deng, Lian
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Skin color is a well-recognized adaptive trait and has been studied extensively in humans. Understanding the genetic basis of adaptation of skin color in various populations has many implications in human evolution and medicine. DISCUSSION: Impressive progress has been made recently to identify genes associated with skin color variation in a wide range of geographical and temporal populations. In this review, we discuss what is currently known about the genetics of skin color variation. We enumerated several cases of skin color adaptation in global modern humans and archaic hominins, and illustrated why, when, and how skin color adaptation occurred in different populations. Finally, we provided a summary of the candidate loci associated with pigmentation, which could be a valuable reference for further evolutionary and medical studies. CONCLUSION: Previous studies generally indicated a complex genetic mechanism underlying the skin color variation, expanding our understanding of the role of population demographic history and natural selection in shaping genetic and phenotypic diversity in humans. Future work is needed to dissect the genetic architecture of skin color adaptation in numerous ethnic minority groups around the world, which remains relatively obscure compared with that of major continental groups, and to unravel the exact genetic basis of skin color adaptation.
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spelling pubmed-55024122017-07-12 Adaptation of human skin color in various populations Deng, Lian Xu, Shuhua Hereditas Review BACKGROUND: Skin color is a well-recognized adaptive trait and has been studied extensively in humans. Understanding the genetic basis of adaptation of skin color in various populations has many implications in human evolution and medicine. DISCUSSION: Impressive progress has been made recently to identify genes associated with skin color variation in a wide range of geographical and temporal populations. In this review, we discuss what is currently known about the genetics of skin color variation. We enumerated several cases of skin color adaptation in global modern humans and archaic hominins, and illustrated why, when, and how skin color adaptation occurred in different populations. Finally, we provided a summary of the candidate loci associated with pigmentation, which could be a valuable reference for further evolutionary and medical studies. CONCLUSION: Previous studies generally indicated a complex genetic mechanism underlying the skin color variation, expanding our understanding of the role of population demographic history and natural selection in shaping genetic and phenotypic diversity in humans. Future work is needed to dissect the genetic architecture of skin color adaptation in numerous ethnic minority groups around the world, which remains relatively obscure compared with that of major continental groups, and to unravel the exact genetic basis of skin color adaptation. BioMed Central 2017-06-15 /pmc/articles/PMC5502412/ /pubmed/28701907 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s41065-017-0036-2 Text en © The Author(s) 2017 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Review
Deng, Lian
Xu, Shuhua
Adaptation of human skin color in various populations
title Adaptation of human skin color in various populations
title_full Adaptation of human skin color in various populations
title_fullStr Adaptation of human skin color in various populations
title_full_unstemmed Adaptation of human skin color in various populations
title_short Adaptation of human skin color in various populations
title_sort adaptation of human skin color in various populations
topic Review
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5502412/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28701907
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s41065-017-0036-2
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