Fassberg Seminar - ONLINE SEMINAR: Genetic Adaptation to Extremes: Understanding Human Physiology by Exceeding its Limits

Humans have conquered a remarkable array of environments through technological innovation and the adoption of unique lifestyle strategies. However, natural selection has also played a role; extreme environments and adaptive lifestyles impose selective forces that have shaped human populations in distinctive and powerful ways. By considering these systems, evolution provides the rare opportunity to examine the results of natural ‘experiments’ over thousands of years within our own species. One such population, the Sea Nomads of southeast Asia, has evolved over millennia to better tolerate the physiological stresses imposed by their marine-foraging lifestyle through at least two apparent protective phenotypes. A molecular follow up to one Sea Nomad adaptation has revealed that it arises from a perhaps entirely uncharacterized mechanism of stimulating red blood cell proliferation, underscoring the potential for such populations to inform clinically relevant research. Other populations, including another group of traditional breath-hold divers in Korea called the Haenyeo, demonstrate phenotypes that are promising as the focus of future studies. With an increasing global shift away from traditional lifestyles, these populations are quietly disappearing, adding an increasing urgency to uncover the traits that make them extraordinary.