Dr. Dawn Bowdish describes how the lab’s NSERC funded research uncovered a link between mutations that protect humans against tuberculosis but leave us susceptible to particulate air pollution.
Read the story here.
Based on the research below:
Bowdish DM, Sakamoto K, Lack NA, Hill PC, Sirugo G, Newport MJ, Gordon S, Hill AV, Vannberg FO. Genetic variants of MARCO are associated with susceptibility to pulmonary tuberculosis in a Gambian population. BMC Med Genet. 2013 Apr 23;14:47. doi: 10.1186/1471-2350-14-47. PMID: 23617307; PMCID: PMC3652798.
Novakowski KE, Huynh A, Han S, Dorrington MG, Yin C, Tu Z, Pelka P, Whyte P, Guarné A, Sakamoto K, Bowdish DM. A naturally occurring transcript variant of MARCO reveals the SRCR domain is critical for function. Immunol Cell Biol. 2016 Aug;94(7):646-55. doi: 10.1038/icb.2016.20. Epub 2016 Feb 18. PMID: 26888252; PMCID: PMC4980223.
Novakowski KE, Yap NVL, Yin C, Sakamoto K, Heit B, Golding GB, Bowdish DME. Human-Specific Mutations and Positively Selected Sites in MARCO Confer Functional Changes. Mol Biol Evol. 2018 Feb 1;35(2):440-450. doi: 10.1093/molbev/msx298. PMID: 29165618; PMCID: PMC5850514.
Also featured in the New York Times “Air Pollution, Evolution and The Fate of Billions of Humans” by Carl Zimmer
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/13/science/air-pollution-fires-genes.html