Collective effects of SNPs on transgenerational inheritance in Caenorhabditis elegans and budding yeast

Abstract

We studied the collective effects of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) on transgenerational inheritance in Caenorhabditis elegans recombinant inbred advanced intercross lines (RIAILs) and yeast segregants. We divided the RIAILs and segregants into two groups of high and low minor allele content (MAC). RIAILs with higher MAC needed less generations of benzaldehyde training to gain a stable olfactory imprint and showed a greater change from normal after benzaldehyde training. Yeast segregants with higher MAC showed a more dramatic shortening of the lag phase length after ethanol exposure. The short lag phase as acquired by ethanol training was more dramatically lost after recovery in ethanol free medium for the high MAC group. We also found a preferential association between MAC and traits linked with higher number of additive QTLs. These results suggest a role for the collective effects of SNPs in transgenerational inheritance, and may help explain human variations in disease susceptibility.

Accumulation of Minor Alleles of Common SNPs in Schizophrenia

“…We also identified a set of 82 419 SNPs that can predict with certainty a fraction of schizophrenia cases. These results are consistent with previous work on other complex diseases and traits (Yuan et al, 2014;Zhu et al, 2015a;Zhu et al, 2015b).…”

“…Our previous studies have shown that the collective effects of MAs may play a role in numerous traits and diseases (Yuan et al, 2014;Zhu et al, 2015a;Zhu et al, 2015b). Specifically, enrichment of genome wide common SNPs or MAs is associated with Parkinson's disease (Zhu et al, 2015b) and lower reproductive fitness in C.elegans and yeasts (Zhu et al, 2015a). We here studied the role of genome wide MAs as a collective whole in schizophrenia using previously published GWAS datasets.…”

Modern human origins: multiregional evolution of autosomes and East Asia origin of Y and mtDNA

“…This software is freely available at https://github.com/health1987/dist and has been described in detail in previous publications (23,95). We obtained PGD for each of the 25 human groups in the 1kGP data and obtained average PGD per group for groups within each of the 5 major continents as represented by the 1kGP.…”

“…In recent years, a more complete molecular evolutionary theory, the maximum genetic distance or diversity (MGD) hypothesis, has been making steady progress in solving both evolutionary and contemporary biomedical problems (20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27). The core concept of the MGD theory, maximum genetic diversity, is a priori expected and supported by numerous facts (20,28,29).…”

Enrichment in conservative amino acid changes among fixed and standing missense variations in slow evolving proteins

“…By using the overlap ratio method, we have verified that the vast majority of proteins show maximum distances and only a small proportion, the slowest evolving, are still at the linear phase of changes (Huang 2010;Luo, Huang 2016;Yuan et al 2017). Variations at most genomic sites within human populations are also at optimum equilibrium as evidenced by the observation that a slight increase above the present genetic diversity level in normal subjects is associated with patient populations suffering from complex diseases (Yuan et al 2012;Yuan et al 2014;Zhu et al 2015;He et al 2017;Lei et al 2018), as well as the observation that sharing of SNPs among different racial groups is an evolutionary rate dependent phenomenon with more sharing in fast evolving sequences ).…”