{"id":16619,"date":"2015-02-16T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-02-16T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/genomequebec.com\/actualites-et-publications\/sex-has-another-benefit-it-makes-humans-less-prone-to-disease-over-time\/"},"modified":"2015-02-16T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-02-16T05:00:00","slug":"sex-has-another-benefit-it-makes-humans-less-prone-to-disease-over-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/genomequebec.com\/en\/news-and-publications\/sex-has-another-benefit-it-makes-humans-less-prone-to-disease-over-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Sex has another benefit: it makes humans less prone to disease over time"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><strong>Mixing our genes through sex helps purge us of disease mutations<\/p>\n<p><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p><span>Researchers at the University of Montreal and the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Research Centre in Montr\u00e9al, Canada have just shown how humanity\u2019s predispositions to disease gradually decrease the more we mix our genetic material together.\u00a0<span>This discovery was finally made possible by the availability in recent years of repositories of biological samples and genetic data from different populations around the globe.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Philip Awadalla and his team studied the sequenced genomes of hundreds of individuals from Canada\u2019s CARTaGENE genetic data repository and the multinational 1000 Genomes Project. They found that the proportion of mutations associated with disease was significantly higher in low recombining segments known as \u201ccoldspots\u201d relative to highly recombining regions, and that the bad mutations in these coldspots were generally more damaging than the mutations in the highly recombining segments.<\/p>\n<p>The team was able to compare this phenomenon across four present-day population basins: Africans, Asians, Europeans and Canadians of French descent. Each of these genetic groups exhibit the above behaviour to varying degrees. African individuals showed the smallest relative proportion of disease-associated mutations on their genome\u2019s coldspots, with Western Europeans showing the largest.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>To read the <a href=\"http:\/\/research.chusj.org\/en\/Communications\/Nouvelles\/2015\/Sex-has-another-benefit-it-makes-humans-less-pron\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">press release, click here. <\/a><\/p>\n<p>To learn more on the study published in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/ng\/journal\/vaop\/ncurrent\/full\/ng.3216.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Nature Genetics<\/em>, click here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mixing our genes through sex helps purge us of disease mutations Researchers at the University of Montreal and the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Research Centre in Montr\u00e9al, Canada have just shown&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15630,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[294],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nouvelles"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/genomequebec.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/genomequebec.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/genomequebec.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genomequebec.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genomequebec.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/genomequebec.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16619\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genomequebec.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/genomequebec.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genomequebec.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genomequebec.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}