Liveblogging the Molecular Evolution/Infectious Diseases Keystone Conference

I am in Breckenridge at the Keystone Symposium on Molecular Evolution as a Driving Force in Infectious Diseases. This is my first attempt at liveblogging a conference, and I'll do my best to post highlights of each session. My training is in infectious diseases, not evolutionary biology, but I'm here because our most recent paper, which described a new member of the cholesterol-dependent cytolysin family of bacterial toxins, led me into a project looking at the evolutionary history of that family. I'll be presenting some of that work later in the conference and am hoping to learn from people who think about these things for a living.

So far, the conference has been great. It is a very internationally representative group, something that Keystone has been striving for with their Global Health Series of symposia. The evening session today was a plenary lecture by Sir David Weatherall, who spoke about the interaction between malaria and human evolution. The title of the talk was "The Role of Genetic Variation in Susceptibility to Malaria in Human Evolution: Was Haldane Right?" He started off with brief descriptions of the pathophysiology of malaria and the hemoglobinopathies. He described JRS Haldane's response to a description of thalassemia mutation rates at a conference in 1948, in which he postulated a heterozygote advantage for carriers of hemoglobinopathy alleles. Weatherall reviewed his data, collected over decades, and those of other groups, showing how far we have come toward a mechanistic understanding of the interaction between hemoglobinopathies and malaria and how powerful the selective pressure of some diseases can be on the shaping of human evolution. Two issues that I had never even considered were the interactions between alleles in people who carry multiple mutations (such as HbS trait/alpha-thalassemia or HbE/beta-thalassemia) on overall malaria susceptibility (overall point: it can be quite complicated, and some of these interactions may even restore wild-type susceptibility), and the possible implications of these very frequent alleles as we move forward with malaria vaccine trials in Africa and elsewhere. Some of the most recent work on polygenic interactions is covered in a recent PNAS paper as well.

I'm looking forward to the sessions tomorrow, which focus on viral diseases, and I'm also hoping that FedEx delivers my poster as scheduled...



O'Donnell, A., Premawardhena, A., Arambepola, M., Allen, S.J., Peto, T.E., Fisher, C.A., Rees, D.C., Olivieri, N.F., Weatherall, D.J. (2007). Age-related changes in adaptation to severe anemia in childhood in developing countries. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(22), 9440-9444. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0703424104