Carmody Rachel N, Dannemann Michael, Briggs Adrian W, Nickel Birgit, Groopman Emily E, Wrangham Richard W, Kelso Janet
Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University.
Department of Evolutionary Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.
Genome Biol Evol. 2016 Apr 13;8(4):1091-103. doi: 10.1093/gbe/evw059.
Humans have been argued to be biologically adapted to a cooked diet, but this hypothesis has not been tested at the molecular level. Here, we combine controlled feeding experiments in mice with comparative primate genomics to show that consumption of a cooked diet influences gene expression and that affected genes bear signals of positive selection in the human lineage. Liver gene expression profiles in mice fed standardized diets of meat or tuber were affected by food type and cooking, but not by caloric intake or consumer energy balance. Genes affected by cooking were highly correlated with genes known to be differentially expressed in liver between humans and other primates, and more genes in this overlap set show signals of positive selection in humans than would be expected by chance. Sequence changes in the genes under selection appear before the split between modern humans and two archaic human groups, Neandertals and Denisovans, supporting the idea that human adaptation to a cooked diet had begun by at least 275,000 years ago.
一直以来，有人认为人类在生物学上适应了熟食，但这一假说尚未在分子水平上得到验证。在此，我们将小鼠的对照喂养实验与比较灵长类基因组学相结合，以表明食用熟食会影响基因表达，且受影响的基因在人类谱系中带有正选择信号。喂食标准化肉类或块茎饮食的小鼠的肝脏基因表达谱受食物类型和烹饪方式的影响，但不受热量摄入或消费者能量平衡的影响。受烹饪影响的基因与已知在人类和其他灵长类动物肝脏中差异表达的基因高度相关，并且在这个重叠集合中，显示人类正选择信号的基因比偶然预期的更多。被选择基因的序列变化出现在现代人类与两个古代人类群体（尼安德特人和丹尼索瓦人）分化之前，这支持了人类对熟食的适应至少在27.5万年前就已开始的观点。
