Abstract
Of more than 1,000 human olfactory receptor genes, more than half seem to be pseudogenes. We investigated whether the most recent of these disruptions might still segregate with the intact form by genotyping 51 candidate genes in 189 ethnically diverse humans. The results show an unprecedented prevalence of segregating pseudogenes, identifying one of the most pronounced cases of functional population diversity in the human genome.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 12 print issues and online access
$209.00 per year
only $17.42 per issue
Buy this article
- Purchase on Springer Link
- Instant access to full article PDF
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Glusman, G., Yanai, I., Rubin, I. & Lancet, D. Genome Res. 11, 685–702 (2001).
Zhang, X. & Firestein, S. Nat. Neurosci. 5, 124–133 (2002).
Young, J.M. et al. Hum. Mol. Genet. 11, 535–546 (2002).
Gilad, Y., Man, O., Paabo, S. & Lancet, D. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 100, 3324–3327 (2003).
Ehlers, A. et al. Genome Res. 10, 1968–1978 (2000).
Menashe, I., Man, O., Lancet, D. & Gilad, Y. Hum. Mol. Genet. 11, 1381–1390 (2002).
Gilad, Y. & Lancet, D. Mol. Biol. Evol. 20, 307–314 (2003).
Amoore, J.E. Ann. NY Acad. Sci. 237, 137–143 (1974).
Whissell-Buechy, D. & Amoore, J.E. Nature 242, 271–273 (1973).
Schoneberg, T., Schulz, A. & Gudermann, T. Rev. Physiol. Biochem. Pharmacol. 144, 143–227 (2002).
Wysocki, C.J. & Beauchamp, G.K. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 81, 4899–4902 (1984).
Yeager, M. & Hughes, A.L. Immunol. Rev. 167, 45–58 (1999).
Barron, K.S. & Robinson, M.A. Hum. Immunol. 40, 17–19 (1994).
Harrison, P.M. et al. Genome Res. 12, 272–280 (2002).
Acknowledgements
We thank M. Przeworski for helpful discussions. D.L. holds the Ralph and Lois Silver Chair in Human Genomics. This work was supported by the Crown Human Genome Center at the Weizmann Institute of Science and by an Israel Ministry of Science grant to the National Laboratory for Genome Infrastructure.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
Supplementary information
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Menashe, I., Man, O., Lancet, D. et al. Different noses for different people. Nat Genet 34, 143–144 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng1160
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ng1160
This article is cited by
-
Human subsistence and signatures of selection on chemosensory genes
Communications Biology (2023)
-
The unconscious perception of smells as a driver of consumer responses: a framework integrating the emotion-cognition approach to scent marketing
AMS Review (2021)
-
Expert curation of the human and mouse olfactory receptor gene repertoires identifies conserved coding regions split across two exons
BMC Genomics (2020)
-
Individual Differences as a Key Factor to Uncover the Neural Underpinnings of Hedonic and Social Functions of Human Olfaction: Current Findings from PET and fMRI Studies and Future Considerations
Brain Topography (2019)
-
New insights into the pharmacogenomics of antidepressant response from the GENDEP and STAR*D studies: rare variant analysis and high-density imputation
The Pharmacogenomics Journal (2018)
