Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences, School of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, 44106, USA.
Departments of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
Sci Rep. 2017 Nov 16;7(1):15689. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-15864-x.
Understanding human mating patterns, which can affect population genetic structure, is important for correctly modeling populations and performing genetic association studies. Prior studies of assortative mating in humans focused on trait similarity among spouses and relatives via phenotypic correlations. Limited research has quantified the genetic consequences of assortative mating. The degree to which the non-random mating influences genetic architecture remains unclear. Here, we studied genetic variants associated with human height to assess the degree of height-related assortative mating in European-American and African-American populations. We compared the inbreeding coefficient estimated using known height associated variants with that calculated from frequency matched sets of random variants. We observed significantly higher inbreeding coefficients for the height associated variants than from frequency matched random variants (P < 0.05), demonstrating height-related assortative mating in both populations.
了解人类的交配模式，这会影响人口遗传结构，对于正确建立人口模型和进行遗传关联研究很重要。之前对人类选择性交配的研究主要集中在配偶和亲属之间的表型相关性方面的特征相似性。有限的研究已经量化了选择性交配的遗传后果。非随机交配影响遗传结构的程度尚不清楚。在这里，我们研究了与人类身高相关的遗传变异，以评估欧洲裔美国人和非裔美国人中与身高相关的选择性交配程度。我们比较了使用已知与身高相关的变异体估算的近交系数与从频率匹配的随机变异体集计算出的近交系数。我们观察到与身高相关的变异体的近交系数显著高于频率匹配的随机变异体（P<0.05），这表明在两个群体中都存在与身高相关的选择性交配。
