Are there any other well documented examples of loci that are duplicated and highly polymorphic?
Apparently KIR genes are, but finding a straight answer as to what loci are highly polymorphic and/or duplicated is not very easy from the human based literature.
Any examples of duplicated polymorphic loci (immune related or not) would be of interest.
Thanks in advance,
Jackie
Hi Jackie,
indeed KIR in humans and other non-human primates are examples of expanded genes that have also a great amount of polymorphism. You can find the different alleles and haplotypes in several online data based, e.g. https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ipd/kir/sequenced_haplotypes.html.
Other examples of duplicated gene families are the Ly49 in rodents. These are also immue related and have basically the same funciton as KIRs, i.e. expressed mainly on NK cells, they bind to the MHCs on other cells. There is a vast literature concerning these genes encoding NK cell receptors, Ly49 and KIRs are only a few examples. CHIRs in chicken, NKKG2 in lemurs are others.
Hope this helps,
Paola
Hi Jackie,
I believe that you are familiar with salmonids: duplicated allozyme loci often were much more polymorphic than were non-duplicated loci in the many Pacific salmon papers written in the 1980s. I believe that that trend will continue with modern DNA data, but the scoring of GBS stacks retards our ability to identify duplicates (except in your case . . .). Many CNVs and all retained duplicates from WGDs that share alleles are found at the distal ends of chromosomes. Look at the telomeric distribution of elevated heterozygosities in Hohenlohe's 2010 stickleback paper. I think if you look you will find clues in examples of telomeric signals suggesting elevated polymorphism.
Jim
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