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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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"Evolutionary Genomics of Prostate Cancer in African Men"
Joseph Lachance, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
School of Biological Sciences
Georgia Tech
To determine why African men are more likely to suffer from prostate cancer (CaP), we integrated GWAS results and scans of selection with allele frequency data from 64 global populations. Despite substantial overlap in genetic risk scores across populations, we find that predicted CaP risk is highest in West Africans and that a small number of loci drive these differences in risk. There is a strong concordance between genetic risk scores and clinical estimates of CaP mortality. Although most CaP-associated loci are evolving neutrally, we find multiple instances where alleles have hitchhiked to high frequencies with linked locally adaptive alleles.