We’ve discussed the roles of protein-coding sequence change to non-coding change in human evolution before. A new article in Science claims to add more support for the role of non-coding changes. In a set of over 100,000 conserved non-coding regions in the genome, they identify about a thousand with significant acceleration along the human lineage. Interestingly, these regions are enriched near genes involved in neuronal cell adhesion, suggesting…well, something vague about the evolution of cognitive traits.
The methodology used in the paper is supposedly laid out in the Supplementary Information online, but I don’t see it there. But hopefully, this will be an interesting new method for detecting accelerated evolution in non-coding regions. I’ll probably comment more once I get a hold of the methods section and can make more intelligent critiques.
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