Publication Date:
2011-11-05
Description:
Since their origin, human populations have colonized the whole planet, but the demographic processes governing range expansions are mostly unknown. We analyzed the genealogy of more than one million individuals resulting from a range expansion in Quebec between 1686 and 1960 and reconstructed the spatial dynamics of the expansion. We find that a majority of the present Saguenay Lac-Saint-Jean population can be traced back to ancestors having lived directly on or close to the wave front. Ancestors located on the front contributed significantly more to the current gene pool than those from the range core, likely due to a 20% larger effective fertility of women on the wave front. This fitness component is heritable on the wave front and not in the core, implying that this life-history trait evolves during range expansions.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Moreau, Claudia -- Bherer, Claude -- Vezina, Helene -- Jomphe, Michele -- Labuda, Damian -- Excoffier, Laurent -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2011 Nov 25;334(6059):1148-50. doi: 10.1126/science.1212880. Epub 2011 Nov 3.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Centre de Recherche, Hopital Sainte-Justine, Universite de Montreal, 3175 Cote Sainte-Catherine, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22052972" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
*Demography
;
Emigration and Immigration
;
Family Characteristics
;
Female
;
Fertility
;
*Gene Pool
;
Genes
;
*Genetic Fitness
;
Humans
;
Male
;
Marriage
;
*Pedigree
;
*Population Dynamics
;
Quebec
;
Registries
;
Reproduction
;
*Selection, Genetic
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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