Almost half our genes can be the starting point for diseases. Scientists have identified 11,000 genes that occur in the human genome in variants that can cause disease. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön and the Harvard Medical School have studied why such high-risk genes persist in the human genome instead of being eliminated by selection. Their analyses suggest that the continuous adaptation to new pathogens in the course of evolution has increased the diversity of our immune genes but also comes at a price. According to the researchers, such diversity also extends to neighbouring DNA segments, where it results in the persistence of harmful gene variants.
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