News
2017
Dr McCarthy-Jones has co-edited a free ebook on hallucinations, published by Frontiers in Psychology, consisting of journal articles on a range of aspects of the understanding and management of hallucinations. It can be downloaded via http://bit.ly/2g04NC1
Dr McCarthy-Jones reviews the recently published 'hearing voices' research literature in his This Month in Voices blog: http://bit.ly/2hQ7nb8
In a new blog post, Dr McCarthy-Jones considers whether 'hearing voices' was present in the Ancient world: http://bit.ly/2i538JP
2016
Shigeki Nakagome has co-authored the paper A time transect of exomes from a Native American population before and after European contact recently published in the Journal Nature Communications.
The research team sequenced 25 exomes of the Tsimshian i.e., an additional 25 ancient exomes extracted from skeletal remains of people who lived in the same region between 800 and 6000 years ago. After establishing genetic continuity between the ancient and modern population, not only could allele frequencies of a single population be traced through time but, more importantly, genetic changes could be traced of a first Nation before and after European contact. The team detected strong signatures of positive selection on genetic variants on a class II human leucocyte antigen (HLA) gene in the ancient group (pre-contact), but not in the modern group (post-contact). One of the alleles was found in nearly 100% of the ancient individuals, but only in 37% of their modern counterparts. This shift in allele frequency was estimated to have occurred 175 years ago, which overlaps with the devastating smallpox epidemics suffered in the region. These findings suggest that the HLA genetic variants were adaptive to local pathogens in the ancient environment but may have played a role in disease susceptibility when the environment changed after European contact.