Population genetics articles from across Nature Portfolio

An analysis of 707 genes in 215 rose samples provides hypotheses on the history of wild and cultivated roses.

Polygenic risk prediction in non-European populations is limited by small sample sizes and tuning sets. Here, the authors show that JointPRS improves cross-population prediction accuracy by leveraging genetic correlations without requiring individual-level data.

Levantine Phoenicians made little genetic contribution to Punic settlements in the central and western Mediterranean between the sixth and second centuries bce; instead, the Punic people derived most of their ancestry from a genetic profile similar to that of Sicily and the Aegean, with notable contributions from North Africa as well.

An analysis of 707 genes in 215 rose samples provides hypotheses on the history of wild and cultivated roses.

Self-domestication in Aedes aegypti mosquitoes (the behaviour of living in association with humans for the past 5,000 years) was accompanied by hundreds of genetic adaptations that affect chemosensory, neuronal, regulatory and metabolic functions. Such adaptations arose by selection acting on preexisting genetic variation and local adaptation driven by neuronal olfactory redundancy.

In this Journal Club, Minoli Perera reflects on a 2005 sequencing study by Cohen et al., who discovered two common loss-of-function mutations with large effects on plasma cholesterol levels thanks to the inclusion of African American study participants.

The creation of pangenome references for the 2.5 billion people in the Middle East and South Asia will advance precision medicine and promote global health equity.

Environmental exposures contribute substantially to interindividual variation in aging outcomes, yet the range of exposures studied in the laboratory — or in relatively affluent human cohort studies — fails to capture the wide spectrum of challenges faced by human populations. Dan Nussey highlights how longitudinal studies of aging in the wild, such as the St Kilda Soay sheep project, can help us to understand variation in physiological resilience and healthy aging.