Lingering effects of Neanderthal DNA found in modern humans | Hacker News Reader

Lingering effects of Neanderthal DNA found in modern humans

phys.org

63 pointswglb22 comments

influencing 47 distinct genetic traits, such as how fast someone can burn calories or a person's natural immune resistance to certain diseases.

Annoying that the article doesn't actually tell us what the effects are. Do these Neanderthal genes make it easier or harder to burn calories? Against which diseases do Neanderthal genes give an advantage and against which a disadvantage?

It links to the actual journal article (which can be read for free).

On looking at that, it seems likely the phys.org article doesn't specify because neither does the journal article. It just says that some of the genes are relevant to immune function or lipid metabolism, not what the differences imply for those things. It also mentions other things the identified genes relate to (mostly a nonspecific "development"), again without specifying what tangible differences might result beyond mentioning "developmental disorders".

I watched a docuseries on CuriosityStream last week where they seemed to be discussing this. The researchers in that case said Neanderthal genes were associated with greater tendency toward addiction and depression, possibly autism, and probably helped European Homo sapiens become white faster.

The autism thing was particularly fascinating, because they were doing this based on growing miniature incomplete brains in petri dishes using pure sapiens and pure neanderthalensis variants, hooking those brains up to robots, and comparing behavior. I had no idea that was possible to do.

Here's the source paper (Mar 20, 2023): https://elifesciences.org/articles/80757

> Department of Computational Biology, Cornell University, United States; Department of Human Genetics, University of California, Los Angeles, United States; Department of Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles, United States; Analytical and Translational Genetics Unit, Center for Genomic Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, United States; Program in Medical and Population Genetics, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, United States; Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, United States; Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, United States; Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, United States; Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, United States; Center for Genetic Epidemiology, Department of Public and Population Health Sciences, University of Southern California, United States; Division of Genetics,Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, United States; Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Harvard Medical School, United States; Department of Computational Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, United States

Who is paying all these research institutes to construct this narrative about Neanderthals? And what does any of this have to do with medicine and health?

The relation to medicine and health is fairly simple: all population studies on the relationship between genetics and phenotype are useful for identifying (and hence learning about, and hence treating) gene-linked health conditions.

The funding is in the acknowledgements section:

> We thank Bogdan Pasaniuc and Kirk Lohmueller for feedback on the manuscript. DR was supported by an Allen Discovery Center grant on Brain Evolution from the Paul Allen Foundation, John Templeton Foundation grant 61220, US National Science Foundation HOMINID grant BCS-1032255, US National Institutes of Health grants GM100233 and HG006399, and is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. SS is supported in part by NIH grants R35GM125055, NSF grants III-1705121, CAREER-1943497, an Alfred P Sloan Research Fellowship, and a gift from the Okawa Foundation. PL was supported by a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interfaces and the Next Generation Fund at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

These are researchers associated with multiple institutes each, so you've inflated the apparent number by quoting them multiple times. Only 10 people are listed as authors (fairly small for a genetics paper) and of those, two are PIs, three (including the two main authors) are from the same research lab, and the rest are associated with the PIs.

If you want to know the rationale for why this is "useful research" for the public to fund, look at the funding applications. They're public and the paper even lists them by grant number to make it easy. Here's one: https://grantome.com/grant/NIH/R01-GM100233-05

It's fundamental research on the human genome though, pretty obviously applicable to medicine and human health.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/01/neanderthals-...

https://academic.oup.com/gbe/article/13/1/evaa250/6008690?lo...

Sounds to me they are saying this is a significant reduction in the Neanderthal genes that survive today, down to 4303 that can't be attributed to other human variants. This would make more sense to me, as the usual statement of up to 4% of a person's genes would be enough to create a unique species, wouldn't it?

That depends entirely on what the genes in question do. Some pairs of species can produce viable offspring even though the parent species have different numbers of chromosomes.

I'm editing this because I'm wrong but leaving original comment below.

On second thought, this research wouldn't be looking at genes that would be highly variable among human populations, that DNA tests would profile to identify individuals, but on genes highly conserved among the human genome, where 4303 changed genes would be a significant amount. I was ranting about the wrong thing.

Original comment: Point taken. Speciation is certainly messy.

4303 statistically significant coding genes is just essentially "a good start" when it comes to identify what, if any, Neanderthal inheritance modern humans might have, compared to a potential "4% of genes DNA tests bother profiling, which now could have still come from some undetermined modern human population, that just so happened to have the same alleles as Neanderthals, including non-coding genes that we couldn't pinpoint effects anyways".

I think that would explain the ambiguity in the articles about actual effects of these identified genes, that's for the follow-up research.

Neanderthals themselves were barely a unique species compared to sapiens, and they had 100% Neanderthal variants. 4% of the genome consisting of their variants makes a variety, at best.

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