Abundance of ethnically biased microsatellites in human gene regions

Nick Kinney, Lin Kang, Laurel Eckstrand, Arichanah Pulenthiran, Peter Samuel, Ramu Anandakrishnan, Robin T Varghese, P Michalak and Harold R Garner

PLOS ONE, 2019, vol. 14, issue 12, 1-20

Abstract: Microsatellites–a type of short tandem repeat (STR)–have been used for decades as putatively neutral markers to study the genetic structure of diverse human populations. However, recent studies have demonstrated that some microsatellites contribute to gene expression, cis heritability, and phenotype. As a corollary, some microsatellites may contribute to differential gene expression and RNA/protein structure stability in distinct human populations. To test this hypothesis, we investigate genotype frequencies, functional relevance, and adaptive potential of microsatellites in five super-populations (ethnicities) drawn from the 1000 Genomes Project. We discover 3,984 ethnically-biased microsatellite loci (EBML); for each EBML at least one ethnicity has genotype frequencies statistically different from the remaining four. South Asian, East Asian, European, and American EBML show significant overlap; on the contrary, the set of African EBML is mostly unique. We cross-reference the 3,984 EBML with 2,060 previously identified expression STRs (eSTRs); repeats known to affect gene expression (64 total) are over-represented. The most significant pathway enrichments are those associated with the matrisome: a broad collection of genes encoding the extracellular matrix and its associated proteins. At least 14 of the EBML have established links to human disease. Analysis of the 3,984 EBML with respect to known selective sweep regions in the genome shows that allelic variation in some of them is likely associated with adaptive evolution.

Date: 2019
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0225216 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 25216&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0225216

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0225216

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().