gusl: (Default)
This plot of European genomes is an almost perfect match with the map of Europe.
plot, with map )

Interestingly, PC1 is pretty well aligned with North<->South. This suggests that: (a) most migrations happened East<->West (b) there has been less evolutionary pressure in East<->West migrations(?). It would be good to see the statistical significance of this directionality, e.g. by running a bootstrap. And of course, to see whether this holds in other parts of the world... e.g. how about diagonally-aligned landmasses, such as Sumatra?

You can also see that some national borders are sharper than others, e.g. the Iberian peninsula and Italy seem to be fairly isolated from the rest (probably due to the Pyrenees, Alps)

Looking at the "residuals", Romania appears a lot further South than its geographical location. Bulgaria doesn't as much, despite having more Romani per capita. (Is there software to draw cartograms from this type of data?)

Italy looks like the most diverse country (at least, in the first two PCs), since it has the most spread-out cloud. (Also note the 5 individuals who look like they're from Sardinia!)

Placing Slovakia in Southern Italy is probably an artifact of a very small sample size.

See also: manifold learning, the fascinating idea of discovering topological structure from data, which can be interpreted as things like phylogenetic trees or developmental paths (e.g. in the face dataset).
gusl: (Default)
I've been analyzing more evolution stuff, inspired by [livejournal.com profile] tdj. Maybe I'm going a bit overboard (I probably misinterpreted the original meaning, but such speculations are fascinating anyway)

In response to Study reveals a way disease bacteria sense antimicrobials and initiate a counter-defense:
Many living things, from fruit flies to people, naturally produce disease-fighting chemicals, called antimicrobial peptides, to kill harmful bacteria. In a counter move, some disease-causing bacteria have evolved microbial detectors. The bacteria sense the presence of antimicrobial peptides as a warning signal. The alarm sets off a reaction inside the bacteria to avoid destruction.

University of Washington (UW) and McGill researchers have revealed a molecular mechanism whereby bacteria can recognize tiny antimicrobial peptide molecules, then respond by becoming more virulent.


I wrote:

Whoa, such a mechanism could evolve even if it kills the host and stops the bacteria from multiplying. How? Co-evolution: the conditional virulence causes hosts to stop producing antimicrobials (since the ones who produce them die more).

Therefore, the bacteria populations that *do* respond by becoming more virulent have a stable strategy. This is game theory! The 2 players are: HOST'S GENES, and BACTERIA'S GENES, and each player has 2 strategies.

Let's assume virulent reactions to peptide kills the host (-10 for the host).
 \   HOST     peptide   no peptide
BACTERIA

virulent     (-10, -1)    (-1, +1)

non-virulent (0, 0)       (-1, +1)

(HOST_GENES, BACTERIA_GENES)



as long as there is a credible threat of virulence, hosts may "choose" to not produce peptide. I think the evolutionarily stable solution is "mixed strategies".

Individual bacteria do better by not killing the host, but whole bacterial populations that co-evolve with the host do better by having some individuals who become virulent (sacrificing themselves for the greater good of their family), thus "forcing" the host populations' genes to play "no peptide".

I find it plausible that group selection is a strong enough force in bacterial evolution.

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