A new study shows that “matings which took place tens of thousands of years ago are still influencing the biology of contemporary individuals.”
When modern humans first migrated from Africa to the tropical islands of the southwest Pacific, they encountered unfamiliar people and new pathogens. But their immune systems may have picked up some survival tricks when they mated with the locals—the mysteriouswho gave them immune gene variants that might have protected the newcomers’ offspring from local diseases. Some of these variants still persist in the genomes of people living in Papua New Guinea today, according to a new study.
The team then looked for those variants in a database that links genes to various functions in different tissues in humans. They homed in on immune-related gene variants that might promote or enhance a nearby gene’s production of proteins, for example, or shut off or dampen its function. These tweaks can help optimize an immune system for the specific pathogens in its environment; too strong an immune response can be as deadly as the infection itself.
“One of the strengths of the study is that they tested the Denisovan variants in Papuan cell lines, which are essentially the cell environment in which they evolved,” says functional genomicist Francesca Luca of Wayne State University, who was not part of the study.
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