Interactive map of human genetic history revealed

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A global map detailing the genetic histories of 95 different populations across the world, showing likely genetic impacts of European colonialism, the Arab slave trade, the Mongol Empire and European traders near the Silk Road mixing with people in China, has been revealed for the first time.The interactive map, produced by researchers from Oxford University and UCL (University College London), details the histories of genetic mixing between each of the 95 populations across Europe, Africa, Asia and South America spanning the last four millennia.It can be accessed at: http://admixturemap.paintmychromosomes.com/The study, published this week in Science, simultaneously identifies, dates and characterises genetic mixing between populations. To do this, the researchers developed sophisticated statistical methods to analyse the DNA of 1490 individuals in 95 populations around the world. The work was chiefly funded by the Wellcome Trust and Royal Society.’DNA really has the power to tell stories and uncover details of humanity’s past.’ said Dr Simon Myers of Oxford University’s Department of Statistics and Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, co-senior author of the study.’Because our approach uses only genetic data, it provides information independent from other sources. Many of our genetic observations match historical events, and we also see evidence of previously unrecorded genetic mixing. For example, the DNA of the Tu people in modern China suggests that in around 1200CE, Europeans similar to modern Greeks mixed with an otherwise Chinese-like population. Plausibly, the source of this European-like DNA might be merchants travelling the nearby Silk Road.’The powerful technique, christened ‘Globetrotter’, provides insight into past events such as the genetic legacy of the Mongol Empire. Historical records suggest that the Hazara people of Pakistan are partially descended from Mongol warriors, and this study found clear evidence of Mongol DNA entering the population during the period of the Mongol Empire. Six other populations, from as far west as Turkey, showed similar evidence of genetic mixing with Mongols around the same time.’What amazes me most is simply how well our technique works,’ said Dr Garrett Hellenthal of the UCL Genetics Institute, lead author of the study. ‘Although individual mutations carry only weak signals about where a person is from, by adding information across the whole genome we can reconstruct these mixing events. Sometimes individuals sampled from nearby regions can have surprisingly different sources of mixing.’For example, we identify distinct events happening at different times among groups sampled within Pakistan, with some inheriting DNA from sub-Saharan Africa, perhaps related to the Arab Slave Trade, others from East Asia, and yet another from ancient Europe. …


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#Agriculture, #Alzheimer, #China, #Department, #Dna, #European, #Historical, #Slave, #Society, #Study, #Wellcome

Sochi games influenced by Lake Placid winter Olympics of 1932

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Eight crashes that sent more than a dozen competitors to the hospital marred bobsled practice runs leading up to the 1932 winter Olympic games in Lake Placid, N.Y., but as dramatic as those incidents were, they also provide insight into more ordinary factors that continue to influence the Olympics, according to a Penn State researcher.”The crashes occurred on the Mt. Van Hoevenberg slide, which was specially built for the games at Lake Placid,” said Peter Hopsicker, associate professor of kinesiology. “How that facility came to be established provides an historic precedent that has shaped the Olympics since then, including Sochi games.”The winter Olympics were first organized in 1924, and the Lake Placid games were the first to be held in the United States. The upstate New York location was chosen largely in response to the efforts of Godfrey Dewey, who held investments in Lake Placid as a recreational area and hoped to use the Olympics as a springboard for the region’s development as an international winter sports resort.”The bob-run was the centerpiece — you can’t have a winter Olympics without it, it’s expensive but essential,” said Hopsicker, who describes the bob-run’s planning and construction in the spring issue of the Journal of Sport History. “Dewey lobbied heavily to have it located proximate to the tourist villages of Lake Placid and Saranac Lake, yet the state’s environmental policies protected the public Adirondack wilderness.”Dewey ran headlong into a conservation group, the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks, which took legal steps to block his efforts to develop the bob-run on public land, triggering the first battle between developers of an Olympics host city and environmental stewards.The issue became wrapped in politics when New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt balked at spending public funds to build the bob-run no matter where it was located. Dewey lost the battle with the environmentalists and built a world-class bob-run on a privately owned site christened Mt. Van Hoevenberg, but he did persuade Roosevelt to allocate state funds for the games.The completed slide provided unique challenges for the athletes. “It had pronounced drops in the curves,” Hopsicker said, “something new to the sport.”While Dewey provided bobsleds for all international teams, the Germans brought their own sleds built for a more European snow-covered surface. The Germans’ unwillingness to use Dewey’s sleds that were built with the qualities of the Lake Placid slide in mind contributed significantly to the subsequent German crashes during practice runs. …


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#Alternative-Medicine, #Alzheimer, #Association, #Cancer, #Dewey, #European, #Hopsicker, #Placid, #Pregnancy, #Professor, #United, #Winter

Four unknown galaxy clusters containing thousands of galaxies discovered 10 billion light years from Earth

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Four unknown galaxy clusters each potentially containing thousands of individual galaxies have been discovered some 10 billion light years from Earth.An international team of astronomers, led by Imperial College London, used a new way of combining data from the two European Space Agency satellites, Planck and Herschel, to identify more distant galaxy clusters than has previously been possible. The researchers believe up to 2000 further clusters could be identified using this technique, helping to build a more detailed timeline of how clusters are formed.Galaxy clusters are the most massive objects in the universe, containing hundreds to thousands of galaxies, bound together by gravity. While astronomers have identified many nearby clusters, they need to go further back in time to understand how these structures are formed. This means finding clusters at greater distances from Earth.The light from the most distant of the four new clusters identified by the team has taken over 10 billion years to reach us. This means the researchers are seeing what the cluster looked like when the universe was just three billion years old.Lead researcher Dr David Clements, from the Department of Physics at Imperial College London, explains: “Although we’re able to see individual galaxies that go further back in time, up to now, the most distant clusters found by astronomers date back to when the universe was 4.5 billion years old. This equates to around nine billion light years away. Our new approach has already found a cluster in existence much earlier than that, and we believe it has the potential to go even further.”The clusters can be identified at such distances because they contain galaxies in which huge amounts of dust and gas are being formed into stars. This process emits light that can be picked up by the satellite surveys.Galaxies are divided into two types: elliptical galaxies that have many stars, but little dust and gas; and spiral galaxies like our own, the Milky Way, which contain lots of dust and gas. Most clusters in the universe today are dominated by giant elliptical galaxies in which the dust and gas has already been formed into stars.”What we believe we are seeing in these distant clusters are giant elliptical galaxies in the process of being formed,” says Dr Clements.Observations were recorded by the Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver (SPIRE) instrument as part of Herschel Multi-tiered Extragalactic Survey (HerMES). Seb Oliver, Head of the HerMES survey said: “The fantastic thing about Herschel-SPIRE is that we are able to scan very large areas of the sky with sufficient sensitivity and image sharpness that we can find these rare and exotic things. …


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#Agency, #Agriculture, #Alzheimer, #Clusters, #Council, #Earth, #European, #Imperialcollege, #Physics, #Technology

Thinking it through: Scientists seek to unlock mysteries of the brain

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Understanding the human brain is one of the greatest challenges facing 21st century science. If we can rise to this challenge, we will gain profound insights into what makes us human, develop new treatments for brain diseases, and build revolutionary new computing technologies that will have far reaching effects, not only in neuroscience.Scientists at the European Human Brain Project — set to announce more than a dozen new research partnerships worth Eur 8.3 million in funding later this month — the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and the US BRAIN Initiative are developing new paradigms for understanding how the human brain works in health and disease. Today, their international and collaborative projects are defined, explored, and compared during “Inventing New Ways to Understand the Human Brain,” at the 2014 AAAS Annual Meeting in Chicago.Brain Simulation, Big Data, and a New Computing ParadigmHenry Markram from the Ecole Polytechnique Fdrale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Switzerland, where the Human Brain Project is based, describes how the project will leverage available experimental data and basic principles of brain organization to reconstruct the detailed structure of the brain in computer models. The models will allow the HBP to run super-computer based simulations of the inner working of the brain.”Brain simulation allows measurements and manipulations impossible in the lab, opening the road to a new kind of in silico experimentation,” Markram says.The data deluge in neuroscience is resulting in a revolutionary amount of brain data with new initiatives planning to acquire even more. But searching, accessing, and analyzing this data remains a key challenge.Sean Hill, also of EPFL and a speaker at AAAS, leads The Neuroinformatics Platform of the Human Brain Project (HBP). In this scientific panel, he explains how the platform will provide tools to manage, navigate, and annotate spatially referenced brain atlases, which will form the basis for the HBP’s modeling effort — turning Big Data into deep knowledge.The Neuroinformatics Platform will bring together many different kinds of data. University of Edinburgh’s Seth Grant, a key member of the HBP, describes how he is deriving new methods to decode the molecular principles underlying the brain’s organization, such as how individual proteins assemble into larger complexes. As Grant explains in Chicago, this has important practical applications as many mutations in schizophrenia and autism converge on these so-called supercomplexes in the brain.As we understand more and more about the way the brain computes we can apply this knowledge to technology. Karlheinz Meier, of Heidelberg University in Germany and a speaker at AAAS, outlines how he is working to create entirely new computing systems as part of the HBP. These Neuromorphic Computing Systems will merge realistic brain models with new hardware for a completely new paradigm of computing — one that more closely resembles how the brain itself processes information.”The brain has the ability to efficiently perform computations that are impossible even for the most powerful computers while consuming only 30 Watts of power,” Meier says.Brain: Get Ready For Your Close-upAt AAAS, Christof Koch lays out another ambitious, 10-year plan from the Allen Institute for Brain Science: to understand the structure and function of the brain by mapping cell types from mice and humans with computer simulations and figuring out how the cells connect, and how they encode, relay, and process information. …


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#Allen, #Alternative-Medicine, #Computing, #European, #Hbp, #Health, #Institute, #Neuroinformatics, #Science, #Switzerland

Understanding basic biology of bipolar disorder

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Scientists know there is a strong genetic component to bipolar disorder, but they have had an extremely difficult time identifying the genes that cause it. So, in an effort to better understand the illness’s genetic causes, researchers at UCLA tried a new approach.Instead of only using a standard clinical interview to determine whether individuals met the criteria for a clinical diagnosis of bipolar disorder, the researchers combined the results from brain imaging, cognitive testing, and an array of temperament and behavior measures. Using the new method, UCLA investigators — working with collaborators from UC San Francisco, Colombia’s University of Antioquia and the University of Costa Rica — identified about 50 brain and behavioral measures that are both under strong genetic control and associated with bipolar disorder. Their discoveries could be a major step toward identifying the specific genes that contribute to the illness.The results are published in the Feb. 12 edition of the Journal JAMA Psychiatry.A severe mental illness that affects about 1 to 2 percent of the population, bipolar disorder causes unusual shifts in mood and energy, and it interferes with the ability to carry out everyday tasks. Those with the disorder can experience tremendous highs and extreme lows — to the point of not wanting to get out of bed when they’re feeling down. The genetic causes of bipolar disorder are highly complex and likely involve many different genes, said Carrie Bearden, a senior author of the study and an associate professor of psychiatry and psychology at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.”The field of psychiatric genetics has long struggled to find an effective approach to begin dissecting the genetic basis of bipolar disorder,” Bearden said. “This is an innovative approach to identifying genetically influenced brain and behavioral measures that are more closely tied to the underlying biology of bipolar disorder than the clinical symptoms alone are.”The researchers assessed 738 adults, 181 of whom have severe bipolar disorder. They used high-resolution 3-D images of the brain, questionnaires evaluating temperament and personality traits of individuals diagnosed with bipolar disorder and their non-bipolar relatives, and an extensive battery of cognitive tests assessing long-term memory, attention, inhibitory control and other neurocognitive abilities.Approximately 50 of these measures showed strong evidence of being influenced by genetics. Particularly interesting was the discovery that the thickness of the gray matter in the brain’s temporal and prefrontal regions — the structures that are critical for language and for higher-order cognitive functions like self-control and problem-solving — were the most promising candidate traits for genetic mapping, based on both their strong genetic basis and association with the disease.”These findings are really just the first step in getting us a little closer to the roots of bipolar disorder,” Bearden said. …


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#Alternative-Medicine, #Cancer, #Ecology, #European, #Genetic, #Health, #King, #Science