The Trait-specific Timing of Accelerated Genomic Change in the Human Lineage

Overview

Journal Cell Genom

Date 2025 Jan 9

PMID 39788103

Authors

Eucharist Kun

Mashaal Sohail

Vagheesh M Narasimhan

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Humans exhibit distinct characteristics compared to our primate and ancient hominin ancestors. To investigate genomic bursts in the evolution of these traits, we use two complementary approaches to examine enrichment among genome-wide association study loci spanning diseases and AI-based image-derived brain, heart, and skeletal tissue phenotypes with genomic regions reflecting four evolutionary divergence points. These regions cover epigenetic differences among humans and rhesus macaques, human accelerated regions (HARs), ancient selective sweeps, and Neanderthal-introgressed alleles. Skeletal traits such as pelvic width and limb proportions showed enrichment in evolutionary annotations that mirror morphological changes in the primate fossil record. Additionally, we observe enrichment of loci associated with the longitudinal fasciculus in human-gained epigenetic elements since macaques, the visual cortex in HARs, and the thalamus proper in Neanderthal-introgressed alleles, implying that associated cognitive functions such as language processing, decision-making, sensory signaling, and motor control are enriched at different evolutionary depths.

Citing Articles

Tracing human trait evolution through integrative genomics and temporal annotations.

Zeng J Cell Genom. 2025; 5(2):100767.

PMID: 39862864 PMC: 11872422. DOI: 10.1016/j.xgen.2025.100767.

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