Abstract
As an anti-inflammatory mediator IL10 is beneficial in certain contexts and deleterious in others. As increased production of IL10 favours protection against inflammatory disease, whereas low production promotes elimination of foreign pathogens by the host, we investigated the possible influence of balancing selection at this locus. We began by resequencing 48 European and 48 African chromosomes across 2.2 kb of the IL10 promoter region, and compared this with four neighbouring gene regions: MK2, IL19, IL20 and IL24. Analysis of nucleotide diversity showed a positive Tajima's D-test for IL10 in Europeans, of borderline statistical significance (1.89, P=0.05). Analysis of Fst values showed significant population divergence at MK2, IL19, IL20 and IL24 (P<0.01) but not at IL10. Taken together, these findings are consistent with the hypothesis that balancing selection has played a role in the evolution of polymorphisms in the IL10 promoter region.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 6 digital issues and online access to articles
$119.00 per year
only $19.83 per issue
Buy this article
- Purchase on Springer Link
- Instant access to full article PDF
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Moore KW, de Waal Malefyt R, Coffman RL, O'Garra A . Interleukin-10 and the interleukin-10 receptor. Annu Rev Immunol 2001; 19: 683–765.
Redpath S, Ghazal P, Gascoigne NRJ . Hijacking and exploitation of IL-10 by intracellular pathogens. Trends Microbiol 2001; 9: 86–92.
Wall EM, Cao JX, Upton C . Subversion of cytokine networks by viruses. Int Rev Immunol 1998; 17: 121–155.
Lalani AS, McFadden G . Evasion and exploitation of chemokines by viruses. Cytokine Growth Factor Rev 1999; 10: 219–233.
Hsu DH, de Waal Malefyt R, Fiorentino DF, Dang MN, Vieira P, de Vries J et al. Expression of IL-10 activity by Epstein–Barr virus protein BCRF1. Science 1990; 250: 830–832.
Kotenko SV, Saccani S, Izotova LS, Mirochnitchenko OV, Pestka S . Human cytomegalovirus harbours its own unique IL-10 homologue (cmvIL-10). Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2000; 97: 1695–1700.
Redpath S, Angulo A, Gascoigne NR, Ghazal P . Murine cytomegalovirus infection down-regulates MHC class II expression on macrophages by induction of IL10. J Immunol 1999; 162: 6701–6707.
Fowler EV, Eri R, Hume G, Johnstone S, Pandeya N, Lincoln D et al. TNF and IL10 SNPs act together to predict disease behaviour in Crohn's disease. J Med Genet 2005; 42: 523–528.
Lin MT, Storer B, Martin PJ, Tseng LH, Gooley T, Chen PJ et al. Relation of an interluekin-10 promoter polymorphism to graft-versus-host disease and survival after hematopoietic-cell transplantation. N Engl J Med 2003; 349: 2201–2210.
Eskdale J, McNicholl J, Wordsworth P, Jonas B, Huizinga T, Field M et al. Interleukin-10 microsatellite polymorphisms and IL-10 locus alleles in rheumatoid arthritis susceptibility. Lancet 1998; 352: 1282–1283.
Wu MY, Chen HF, Chen SU, Chao KH, Yang YS, Ho HN . Increase in the production of interleukin-10 early after implantation is related to the success of pregnancy. Am J Reprod Immunol 2001; 46: 386–392.
Ozornek MH, Bielfeld P, Krussel JS, Moustafa M, Mikat-Drozdzynski B, Koldovsky U et al. Interferon gamma and interleukin 10 levels in preimplantation embryo culture media. J Assist Reprod Genet 1995; 12: 590–593.
Westendorp RG, van Dunne FM, Kirkwood TB, Helmerhorst FM, Huizinga TW . Optimizing human fertility and survival. Nat Med 2001; 7: 873.
Watier H, Auriault C, Capron A . Does Epstein–Barr virus infection confer selective advantage to malaria-infected children? Lancet 1993; 341: 612–613.
Tajima F . Statistical method for testing the neutral mutation hypothesis by DNA polymorphism. Genetics 1989; 123: 585–595.
Hudson RR, Slatkin M, Maddison WP . Estimation of levels of gene flow from DNA sequence data. Genetics 1992; 132: 583–589.
Bamshad M, Wooding SP . Signatures of natural selection in the human genome. Nat Rev Genet 2003; 4: 99–111.
Hartl DL, Clark AG . Principles of Population Genetics. 3rd edn. Sinauer Associates Inc.: Sunderland, MA, USA, 1997.
Tishkoff SA, Williams SM . Genetic analysis of African populations: human evolution and complex disease. Nat Rev Genet 2002; 3: 611–621.
Bamshad M, Mummidi S, Gonzalez E, Ahuja SS, Dunn DM, Watkins WS et al. A strong signature of balancing selection in the 5′ cis-regulatory region of CCR5. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2002; 99: 10539–10544.
Simonsen KL, Churchill GA, Aquadro CF . Properties of statistical tests of neutrality for DNA polymorphism data. Genetics 1995; 141: 413–429.
Harpending H, Rogers A . Genetic perspectives on human origins and differentiation. Ann Rev Genomics Hum Gen 2000; 1: 361–385.
Eskdale J, Gallagher G, Verweij CL, Keijsers V, Westendorp RG, Huizinga TW . Interleukin 10 secretion in relation to human IL-10 locus haplotypes. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 1998; 95: 9465–9470.
Crawley E, Kay R, Sillibourne J, Patel P, Hutchinson I, Woo P . Polymorphic haplotypes of the interleukin-10 5′ flanking region determine variable interleukin-10 transcription and are associated with particular phenotypes of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. Arthritis Rheum 1999; 42: 1101–1108.
Stone JR, Wray GA . Rapid evolution of cis-regulatory sequences via local point mutations. Mol Biol Evol 2001; 18: 1764–1770.
Dawson E, Abecasis GR, Bumpstead S, Chen Y, Hunt S, Beare DM et al. A first-generation linkage disequilibrium map of human chromosome 22. Nature 2002; 418: 544–548.
Stephens M, Smith NJ, Donnelly P . A new statistical method for haplotype reconstruction from population data. Am J Hum Genet 2001; 68: 978–989.
Acknowledgements
We thank Dr Stanley Usen for his contribution to the Gambian Malaria Study and Dr Rosalind Harding for helpful discussion. This work was financially supported by the Medical Research Council (UK). Ethical approval was given by the Gambian Government/MRC Joint Ethical Committee.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Competing of interest
The authors declare no competing interests.
Supplementary Information accompanies the paper on Genes and Immunity website (http://www.nature.com/gene)
Supplementary information
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Wilson, J., Rockett, K., Keating, B. et al. A hallmark of balancing selection is present at the promoter region of interleukin 10. Genes Immun 7, 680–683 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.gene.6364336
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.gene.6364336
Keywords
This article is cited by
-
Distilling functional variations for human UGT2B4 upstream region based on selection signals and implications for phenotypes of Neanderthal and Denisovan
Scientific Reports (2023)
-
Natural selection in a population of Drosophila melanogaster explained by changes in gene expression caused by sequence variation in core promoter regions
BMC Evolutionary Biology (2016)
-
Local selection of human populations shapes complex evolution patterns of CXCL10 gene
Immunogenetics (2013)
-
Pilot study: possible association of IL10 promoter polymorphisms with CRMO
Rheumatology International (2012)
-
Balancing selection is common in the extended MHC region but most alleles with opposite risk profile for autoimmune diseases are neutrally evolving
BMC Evolutionary Biology (2011)