Rapic Evolution of Lighter Skin Pigmentation in Southern African KhoeSan. Rapic Evolution of Lighter Skin Pigmentation in Southern African KhoeSan

The genetic architecture and polygenicity of skin pigmentation is explored in KhoeSan communities, including Nama individuals whose phenotype and genotype data are provided in this dataset. By pairing genotypes and quantitative spectrophotometric skin pigmentation phenotypes, we show that skin pigmentation is highly heritable in KhoeSan, yet known pigmentation loci only explains a small fraction of the phenotypic variance. Using genome-wide association analyses, we identified both canonical and non-canonical skin pigmentation loci. We show that this phenotype is more polygenic and complex than previously characterized. (Martin et al., Cell 2017. PMID: 29195075) Following up on the top associated signal with large effect size in the gene SLC24A5, we demonstrate that the canonical... (for more see dbGaP study page.)