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Aucune étude en France ne s’est intéressée à l’éventuelle réduction du stock patronymique imputable à la guerre de 1914-1918. L’objet de ce travail est d’estimer l’ampleur du phénomène en prenant en compte les effets aléatoires de la disparition des noms selon le modèle d’extinction de Galton-Watson, la distribution du nombre d’enfants par ménage et la proportion de patronymes selon le nombre de porteurs. Les estimations, sur la France entière et par département, sont établies sur la base du fichier des « Morts pour la France » et du fichier Insee des noms de familles. Si les pertes humaines imputables à la Grande Guerre sont inégalement distribuées sur le territoire, avec un nombre de morts plus élevé au nord d’une ligne La Rochelle-Mulhouse, les pertes patronymiques sont géographiquement différemment réparties et plus nombreuses dans les Pyrénées, en Corse et en Bretagne. Pour autant, les patronymes effectivement disparus ne représentent qu’une proportion faible (1,4%) de l’ensemble des patronymes des MPF. Par département, cette proportion est très variable et souvent en contradiction avec le modèle de Galton- Watson qui prévoit davantage de disparitions. Plusieurs explications sont avancées : elles tiennent au mode de constitution des deux fichiers et aux hypothèses démographiques formulées.

Some of Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel’s publications among the least cited in GoogleScholar are mentioned here, seeking to explain the reasons for their small international audience and showing how they shed light on some aspect of the scientific career path of their author. Quelques publications de Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel parmi celles qui sont le moins citées dans GoogleScholar sont évoquées ici, en cherchant à expliquer les raisons de leur faible audience internationale et en montrant en quoi elles éclairent le parcours scientifique de leur auteur.

International audience; Since 2005, the French legislation allows the transmission of parental surnames to the offspring in ways that are alternative to the traditional transmission of surname of the father. The surnames of both parents can be transmitted, but a choice about their order has to be made. This choice applies to the following generations too, however, the transmission of two double-surnames is not allowed. When there is no agreement among the parents about the order of surnames, or in case of adoption, the alphabetical order can be adopted. If alphabetical surname attributions take place at a high frequency, after some generations a large proportion of family names will start with a surname whose initial letter appears among the first one of the alphabet (A, B, C, etc.).In order to measure the time necessary for this phenomenon to take place, a mathematical model is applied here. The results show that the convergence toward the surnames beginning with A, B, or C would take several generations even with a relatively high frequency (1%) of this particular surname attribution. Thus, surnames beginning with A would double their frequency only after 20 generations.; Depuis 2005, la législation française a modifié les règles de transmission du nom de famille, laissant aux parentslapossibilitédetransmettreàleursenfantsleursdeux noms dans l’ordre de leur choix. Cette règle s’applique également aux générations suivantes sans toutefois permettre la transmission de deux doubles noms. Dans le cas où les parents ne s’accordent pas sur leur choix ou lors d’adoption, l’ordre alphabétique peut être adopté. Si cette situation était fréquente, on s’attendrait à ce que les noms commençant par les premières lettres de l’alphabet (A, B, C, etc.) augmentent après plusieurs générations. Un modèle est ici développé pour mesurer la vitesse de cette convergence en fonction de la fréquence de ce mode particulier d’attribution du nom et en fonction du nombre de générations. Le résultat montre que, même si ce mode particulier de transmission était relativement fréquent (1 %), la convergence vers les noms commençant par A, B ou C ne serait sensible qu’après plusieurs générations. Ainsi, les noms commençant par A ne doubleraient leur fréquence qu’après 20 générations.

International audience

Since their discovery in the early nineties, the human arylamine N-acetyltrasferase (NAT) genes have been the subject of a tremendous number of molecular anthropological studies describing their nucleotide diversity in a wide range of populations worldwide. While (HUMAN)NAT2 presents a high number of nucleotide substitutions, with seven of them reaching polymorphic frequencies in almost all human populations, and a high level of non-synonymous changes relative to synonymous, (HUMAN)NAT1 is much less diverse, particularly in its coding region. A pseudo-gene, NATP, the third member of this small gene family, harbors a diversity similar to NAT2. In accordance with that, selective neutrality tests suggest that (HUMAN)NAT1 and (HUMAN)NAT2 evolve under distinct selective regimes. An evolution of (HUMAN)NAT2 under positive population-specific pressures is proposed to be probably linked to the mode of subsistence and/or the chemical environment populations live in, as reflected by climatic zones and biomes; in contrast, for (HUMAN)NAT1, functional constraints determining the strength of purifying selection are generally invoked.

Studies of how a mammal's daily energy expenditure scales with its body mass suggest that humans, whether Westerners, agro-pastoralists, or hunter–gatherers, all have much lower energy expenditures for their body mass than other mammals. However, non-human primates also differ from other mammals in several life history traits suggestive of low energy use. Judging by field metabolic rates of free-ranging strepsirhine and haplorhine primates with different lifestyle and body mass, estimated using doubly labeled water, primates have lower energy expenditure than other similar-sized eutherian mammals. Daily energy expenditure in humans fell along the regression line of non-human primates. The results suggest that thrifty energy use could be an ancient strategy of primates. Although physical activity is a major component of energy balance, our results suggest a need to revise the basis for establishing norms of energy expenditure in modern humans.

A new method, TreeOfTrees, is proposed to compare X-tree structures obtained from several sets of aligned gene sequences of the same taxa. Its aim is to detect genes or sets of genes having different evolutionary histories. The comparison between sets of trees is based on several tree metrics, leading to a unique tree labelled by the gene trees. The robustness values of its edges are estimated by bootstrapping and consensus procedures that allow detecting subsets of genes having differently evolved. Simulations are performed under various evolutionary conditions to test the efficiency of the method and an application on real data is described. Tests of arboricity and various consensus algorithms are also discussed. A corresponding software package is available.

Objective: The tagging approach appears as a promising tool to test the association of genetic variants with complex traits such as disease susceptibility or drug response. However, since tag markers are selected only on the basis of inter-marker LD properties, regardless of any phenotypes, it remains unclear to what extent they can be useful to predict variable drug responses, once typed in clinical material. We undertook a study to provide further insights into the usefulness of the tagging approach for selecting phenotype-associated markers relevant to drug response. Methods: Several tagging methods were applied to the genotyping data of two drug-metabolizing enzymes, NAT2 and CYP2D6, and the ability of the selected tagging markers to predict the individual metabolizer status was empirically evaluated. We also assessed the impact of LD levels, tagging thresholds and allele frequencies on tagging efficiency. Results: We found that the functional variation was adequately represented by the selected tagging markers, these latter providing a classification accuracy for the individual metabolizer status close to the maximal 100% value observed with the entire set of polymorphisms. Conclusion: The tagging approach is an interesting approach to select candidate gene markers predictive of drug response in pharmacogenomic studies.

Genetic polymorphism in the NAT2 gene is responsible for pronounced interindividual differences in the acetylation activity of the N-acetyltransferase 2 (NAT2) enzyme, which plays a crucial role in the metabolism of many clinically useful drugs and exogenous chemicals. Up to now, most association studies that have attempted to relate the acetylation phenotype in NAT2 to a variety of complex human disorders have led to contradictory results in different populations. Some of these inconsistencies may result from a poor knowledge of linkage patterns at NAT2 and their geographic variation. Using data from an extensive survey of the literature, we investigated the worldwide haplotype diversity and linkage disequilibrium structure of NAT2. For 28 population samples (including 3,994 individuals) from four continental regions (Africa, Europe, Asia, America), we evaluated haplotype tagging efficiency at NAT2 and defined population-specific sets of haplotype tagging SNPs (htSNPs) to be used for future association studies. Tagging common haplotypes yielded 2- to 3-fold savings in European and East Asian samples, while no gains from tagging were observed in samples of African ancestry, which displayed high haplotype diversity at NAT2. htSNPs sets appeared to be portable among populations from a same continent, provided that the continent-specific htSNPs sets were selected with a stringent criterion. A “cosmopolitan” htSNPs set suitable for all human populations could not be identified for the NAT2 gene, but a single four-htSNP set proved to perform successfully in all the non-African populations investigated.

Depuis 1859, annee de sa fondation, la Societe d’Anthropologie de Paris poursuit l’objectif majeur de « …couvrir et diffuser, de maniere pluridisciplinaire, les divers champs de l’activite scientifique internationale dans le domaine de « l’histoire naturelle de l’homme », compris comme l’etude de l’origine et de la diversite du genre Homo» (http://bmsap.revues.org). L’activite ininterrompue que deploie la Societe depuis le XIXe s. pour repondre a cet objectif a beneficie de l’investissement i...

The purpose of this study was to compare the molecular epidemiology of infectious bursal disease virus (IBDV) segments A and B of 50 natural or vaccine IBDV strains that were isolated or produced between 1972 and 2002 in 17 countries from four continents, with phenotypes ranging from attenuated to very virulent (vv). These strains were subjected to sequence and phylogenetic analysis based on partial sequences of genome segments A and B. Although there is co-evolution of the two genome segments (70 % of strains kept the same genetic relatives in the segment A- and B-defined consensus trees), several strains (26 %) were identified with the incongruence length difference test as exhibiting a significantly different phylogenetic relationship depending on which segment was analysed. This suggested that natural reassortment could have occurred. One of the possible naturally occurring reassortant strains, which exhibited a segment A related to the vvIBDV cluster whereas its segment B was not, was thoroughly sequenced (coding sequence of both segments) and submitted to a standardized experimental characterization of its acute pathogenicity. This strain induced significantly less mortality than typical vvIBDVs; however, the mechanisms for this reduced pathogenicity remain unknown, as no significant difference in the bursal lesions, post-infectious antibody response or virus production in the bursa was observed in challenged chickens.

Objectives: Selecting a maximally informative subset of polymorphisms to predict a clinical outcome, such as drug response, requires appropriate search methods due to the increased dimensionality associated with looking at multiple genotypes. In this study, we investigated the ability of several pattern recognition methods to identify the most informative markers in the CYP2D6 gene for the prediction of CYP2D6 metabolizer status. Methods: Four data-mining tools were explored: decision trees, random forests, artificial neural networks, and the multifactor dimensionality reduction (MDR) method. Marker selection was performed separately in eight population samples of different ethnic origin to evaluate to what extent the most informative markers differ across ethnic groups. Results: Our results show that the number of polymorphisms required to predict CYP2D6 metabolic phenotype with a high accuracy can be dramatically reduced owing to the strong haplotype block structure observed at CYP2D6. MDR and neural networks provided nearly identical results and performed the best. Conclusion: Data-mining methods, such as MDR and neural networks, appear as promising tools to improve the efficiency of genotyping tests in pharmacogenetics with the ultimate goal of pre-screening patients for individual therapy selection with minimum genotyping effort.

Blood samples were collected in Algeria from 4,444 army recruits and tested for 10 genetic polymorphic systems. These samples were collected from territorial Wilayas (administrative units of Algeria) from which the young soldiers had originated. Based on similar geography and economic and political history, these Wilayas were clustered into 10 regions. These regions, not part of the governmental administrative units, were characterized by allelic frequencies, and analyzed using R-matrix principal components, Wright's F(ST), spatial autocorrelation, and Mantel tests. Hierarchical relationships between the culturally defined regions were examined using two different analytical methods of phylogenetic tree constructions: neighbor-joining, and unweighted pair group average arithmetic (UPGMA). These results indicated the predominance of genetic homogeneity due to the gene flow between regions, but with some migration emanating from sub-Saharan Africa and Mediterranean Europe. Wright's F(ST) value of 0.0063, based on 16 alleles, suggested a relatively small genetic microdifferentiation of the regions. In Algeria, gene flow apparently swamped most of the effects of stochastic processes and disrupted the relationship between geography and genetics, as characterized by the isolation-by-distance model. Some genetic differences and similarities were observed between regions or clusters of regions. The resulting genetic structure of the Algerian populations is best explained by a combination of gene flow, ecology, and history.

To explore the role of transcriptome polymorphism in adaptation of organisms to their environment, we evaluated this parameter for the Escherichia coli/Shigella bacterial species, which is composed of well-characterized phylogenetic groups that exhibit characteristic life styles ranging from commensalism to intracellular pathogenicity. Both the genomic content and the transcriptome of 10 strains representative of the major E. coli/Shigella phylogenetic groups were evaluated using macroarrays displaying the 4290 K12-MG1655 open reading frames (ORFs). Although Shigella and enteroinvasive E. coli (EIEC) are not monophyletic, phylogenetic analysis of the binary coded (presence/absence) gene content data showed that these organisms group together due to similar patterns of undetectable K12-MG1655 genes. The variation in transcript abundance was then analyzed using a core genome of 2880 genes present in all strains, after adjusting RNA hybridization signals for DNA hybridization signals. Nonrandom changes in gene expression during the evolution of the E. coli/Shigella species were evidenced. Phylogenetic analysis of transcriptome data again showed that Shigella and EIEC strains group together in terms of gene expression, and this convergence involved groups of genes displaying biologically coherent patterns of functional divergence. Unlike the other E. coli strains evaluated, Shigella and EIEC are intracellular pathogens, and therefore face similar selective pressures. Thus, within the E. coli/Shigella species, strains exhibiting a particular life style have converged toward a specific gene expression pattern in a subset of genes common to the species, revealing the role of selection in shaping transcriptome polymorphism.

The first statistical analysis of the French National Registry of volunteer bone marrow donors estimated the probabilities of haplotype frequencies separately for each of the 20 administrative regions of France. Here we propose to use donors' surnames to increase the accuracy of location of the donor's geographical origin. This approach allows us to estimate haplotype frequencies for administrative entities (90 departments) smaller than regions and to correct for bias resulting from recent mobility. We analysed 30 777 donors typed for HLA-A,B and 17 745 donors typed for HLA-A,B,DR,DQ. By using the donors' surnames, we identified common and rare haplotypes (those found in only one department) and estimated the degree of HLA polymorphism at the department level. We also identified departments with a distinctive genetic structure (for example, Paris, Corsica, Pyrenees and Meurthe-et- Moselle). By providing a more accurate geographical distribution of HLA polymorphisms in France, this study will enable us to optimise policies for recruiting bone marrow donors and to improve the fit between the donor file and patients' needs.

The rpoS gene codes for an alternative RNA polymerase sigma factor, which acts as a general regulator of the stress response. Inactivating alleles of rpoS in collections of natural Escherichia coli isolates have been observed at very variable frequencies, from less than 1% to more than 70% of strains. rpoS is easily inactivated in nutrient-deprived environments such as stab storage, which makes it difficult to determine the true frequency of rpoS inactivation in nature. We studied the evolutionary history of rpoS and compared it to the phylogenetic history of bacteria in two collections of 82 human commensal and extraintestinal E. coli strains. These strains were representative of the phylogenetic diversity of the species and differed only by their storage conditions. In both collections, the phylogenetic histories of rpoS and of the strains were congruent, indicating that horizontal gene transfer had not occurred at the rpoS locus, and rpoS was under strong purifying selection, with a ratio of the nonsynonymous mutation rate (Ka) to the synonymous substitution rate (Ks) substantially smaller than 1. Stab storage was associated with a high frequency of inactivating alleles, whereas almost no amino acid sequence variation was observed in RpoS in the collection studied directly after isolation of the strains from the host. Furthermore, the accumulation of variations in rpoS was typical of source-sink dynamics. In conclusion, rpoS is rarely inactivated in natural E. coli isolates within their mammalian hosts, probably because such strains rapidly become evolutionary dead ends. Our data should encourage bacteriologists to freeze isolates immediately and to avoid the use of stab storage.

International audience; A la question lancinante des origines, où la quête des ancêtres tient une place cardinale, répond, de manière grandissante, la nouvelle génétique moléculaire, grâce à un nouveau vecteur de communication, Internet, sur lequel des compagnies commerciales proposent des tests génétiques individualisés. Les enjeux économiques et commerciaux de ces pratiques marchandes sont immenses, et les enjeux éthiques qu’elles soulèvent ne sont pas moins importants, touchant notamment à une possible réactivation des catégories préalables concernant la diversité humaine, notamment les catégories raciales. Une critique de ces tests, menée d’un point de vue interne à la génétique, permet toutefois de relativiser la portée généalogique de leurs résultats et de contester une telle réactivation.Les informations fournies par les tests resteraient en outre bien froides si elles étaient réduites à des données moléculaires brutes, sans la dose indispensable d’esthétique narrative nécessaire à leur réception par les media et le public. Un exemple de recours à ces tests afin de combler un « trou de mémoire » porte sur les « Afro-descendants », qui appartiennent à des populations intensément brassées durant les cinq derniers siècles, et dont les interrogations sur leurs origines sont exacerbées par le fait qu’ils sont largement privés, du fait de l’histoire de la traite et de l’esclavage, d’information généalogique. De manière générale, les résultats, qui doivent être interprétées en tant que simple probabilité, ont tendance à se transformer en certitude pour le public non averti.

International audience; A survey on mobility in rural areas in the early twentieth century was conducted in the western Pyrenees, covering the Basque Country, Béarn, Bigorre and Chalosse. A sample of more than 1,600 people in 351 family groups, including children, parents and grandparents, was used to quantify the various migrations, those between birthplace and place of residence of parents and their children, and those between spouses’ birthplaces. Dialectal practice and its transmission between generations were also considered in this study of migration. Through a comparison of the distribution of surnames in these areas and a new methodology, the surnames of sampled people have made it possible to estimate the distance traveled during migration. This study finds a strong geographical homogamy decreasing, and geographical mobility increasing with more recent generations, these movements showing significant differences according to dialect areas.; Une enquête sur la mobilité en milieu rural au début du XXème siècle a été menée dans les Pyrénées occidentales, couvrant le Pays Basque, le Béarn, la Bigorre et la Chalosse. Un échantillon de plus de 1600 personnes regroupées en 351 groupes familiaux incluant enfants, parents et grands-parents a permis de quantifier les différentes migrations, celles entre lieux de naissance et d’habitation des parents et de leurs enfants, et celles entre lieux de naissance des époux. La pratique dialectale et sa transmission entre générations a également été prise en considération dans l’étude de ces migrations. Par comparaison avec la distribution des patronymes dans ces régions, les patronymes des personnes échantillonnées ont permis, grâce à la mise en place d’une nouvelle méthodologie, d’estimer les distances parcourues lors de ces migrations. Cette étude permet de conclure à une forte homogamie géographique qui s’atténue et une mobilité géographique qui s’accroit avec les générations les plus récentes, ces mouvements présentant des différences importantes selon les aires dialectales.

International audience; Surnames are an easy tool to analyse human genetic structure, mobility and evolution. Few studies use surnames to estimate human migration at different geographical level.Here we propose the application of a Bayesian method to estimate the probability of geographical origin (pgo) of migrants in a given area using surnames.This method can be applied with data recordings when they are available for at least two successive periods and in the areas which are the potential sources of emigration. The principle is that the new surnames which are arriving during the second period in the area under investigation can provide information on their geographical origins. The probability of the origin of migrants can easily be estimated iteratively from the frequency of surnames by using the Bayes' theorem.This method is exemplified using civil birth registers at different geographical scales. The pgo of migrants, estimated between two periods (1891-1915 and 1916-1940), (i) from French departments to Paris (ii), from these departments to Tarbes, and (iii) from counties surrounding Tarbes to Tarbes, are mapped and discussed.

We report the results of our analyses of the Genetic Analysis Workshop 12 simulated data set, using phylogenetic methods to reconstruct the history of haplotypes. We selected candidate gene 1 and 6, drawn from the isolate population. In a first step, haplotypes were inferred using family data. In a second step, cladistic approaches were performed to select the most parsimonious trees under various conditions of character state transformation and ancestral hypotheses, in order to check whether the affected status is more frequent in some clades than in others. Sites which are synapormophies of such clades can be viewed as candidate sites for the disease susceptibility. The method seems to be efficient for the candidate gene 1, but not for the candidate gene 6. Effects of the genetic model underlying the affection status are discussed, particularly dominance, penetrance, and, in the context of this simulated data, procedure followed to generate haplotypes. These preliminary results deserve further investigations.

The remarkable conservation of protein structure, compared with that of sequences, suggests that in the course of evolution, residue substitutions which tend to destabilize a particular structure must be compensated by other substitutions that confer greater stability on that structure. Several approaches have been designed to detect correlated changes in a set of homologous sequences. However, most of them do not take into account the phylogeny of the sequences, and it has been shown that their detection power is weak. It remains unclear whether coevolution could be a general process at the level of amino acids of proteins. In the present study, we analyze the phylogenetic reconstruction of 15 sets of homologous proteins to assess, under different conditions, whether a significant amount of coevolving sites can be detected. Two criteria are used to detect significantly cosubstituting sites. One criterion corresponds to that of Shindyalov, Kolchanov, and Sander. The second one is based on intensive simulations of evolution of protein sequences along a phylogeny to estimate the significance of the number of observed cosubstitutions for pairs of sites. Our results show an important sensitivity of the detection of cosubstituting sites to the model used for the phylogenetic reconstruction. Not considering the uncertainty associated with the reconstructed data might lead to detecting numerous false-positive pairs of sites. Finally, significant amounts of coevolving pairs could be found only when substitutions affecting the physicochemical properties of the amino acids were considered. Such results suggest evidence of a cosubstitution mechanism in protein evolution. However, the identification of nonambiguous coevolving sites is still unresolved.

Flemish emigration during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is too complex to be dealt with definitively in a single article. Our main objective is to provide an overview of the migration towards France and Wallonia by looking at its chronology, and the spatial distribution of emigrants and their descendants. In this effort, patronym distribution is very helpful. As markers of migratory movements, patronyms from a collection of nominative lists give us a handle on migration flows as no other evidence can. Comparing France and Wallonia, the two destination areas, it is possible to see similarities between types of migrants: workers in heavy industry, workers in the agricultural sector, and workers engaged in domestic services. In addition, three phases may be identified in the arrival of a Flemish population in France and Wallonia: an emigration phase, an integration phase, and a redistribution phase. The last phase is also part of the urbanization process and is linked with upward social mobility.

Geographical representations of human biological diversity. — The integration of spatial representation into the description of the human biological diversity is analysed from historical and methodological viewpoints. We show how the cartography of races, based on typological concepts at the end of the XIXth, has evolved to multivariate representations of a genetical continuum between human populations. Biological anthropologists make use of methods which modify space in order to fit the biological relationships between populations as well as methods which project these relationships on the real space by minimizing the loss of biological information. These methods are equally known and used by geographers and anthropologists. However, they are applied to different variables and at different scales and they imply different underlying time- space evolutionary models which, for the human biologists, are directly inherited from the population genetics., L'intégration de la dimension spatiale dans la description de la diversité biologique de l'espèce humaine est analysée dans une perspective historique et méthodologique. Il est montré comment la cartographie des races, dans leur définition typologique de la fin du xixe siècle, a évolué pour faire place à une représentation multivariée du continuum génétique entre groupes humains. Sur le plan méthodologique, les anthropologues proposent à la fois des méthodes modifiant l'espace géographique pour l'ajuster aux relations biologiques entre populations et des méthodes projetant les relations biologiques dans un espace conservé. Si les méthodes des anthropologues sont souvent comparables à celles utilisées par les géographes, en revanche les variables et les échelles diffèrent, de même que les modèles d'évolution temporelle et de dispersion spatiale qui sont, pour les anthropologues, directement issus de la génétique de population., Darlu PierreDarlu Pierre. Les représentations géographiques de la diversité biologique dans l'espèce humaine. In: L'Espace géographique, tome 26, n°4, 1997. pp. 341-353.

BACKGROUND: The arylamine N-acetyltransferases (NATs) are a unique family of enzymes widely distributed in nature that play a crucial role in the detoxification of aromatic amine xenobiotics. Considering the temporal changes in the levels and toxicity of environmentally available chemicals, the metabolic function of NATs is likely to be under adaptive evolution to broaden or change substrate specificity over time, making NATs a promising subject for evolutionary analyses. In this study, we trace the molecular evolutionary history of the NAT gene family during the last ~450 million years of vertebrate evolution and define the likely role of gene duplication, gene conversion and positive selection in the evolutionary dynamics of this family. RESULTS: A phylogenetic analysis of 77 NAT sequences from 38 vertebrate species retrieved from public genomic databases shows that NATs are phylogenetically unstable genes, characterized by frequent gene duplications and losses even among closely related species, and that concerted evolution only played a minor role in the patterns of sequence divergence. Local signals of positive selection are detected in several lineages, probably reflecting response to changes in xenobiotic exposure. We then put a special emphasis on the study of the last ~85 million years of primate NAT evolution by determining the NAT homologous sequences in 13 additional primate species. Our phylogenetic analysis supports the view that the three human NAT genes emerged from a first duplication event in the common ancestor of Simiiformes, yielding NAT1 and an ancestral NAT gene which in turn, duplicated in the common ancestor of Catarrhini, giving rise to NAT2 and the NATP pseudogene. Our analysis suggests a main role of purifying selection in NAT1 protein evolution, whereas NAT2 was predicted to mostly evolve under positive selection to change its amino acid sequence over time. These findings are consistent with a differential role of the two human isoenzymes and support the involvement of NAT1 in endogenous metabolic pathways. CONCLUSIONS: This study provides unequivocal evidence that the NAT gene family has evolved under a dynamic process of birth-and-death evolution in vertebrates, consistent with previous observations made in fungi.

Smets Josef, Darlu Pierre. Démographie, patronymes et mentalité entre Hautes-Cévennes et Bas-Languedoc. In: Cahiers de la Méditerranée, n°53, 1, 1996. Histoire et Informatique [Actes du IIème colloque national de l'association française pour l'histoire et l'informatique. Nice, Juin 1995] pp. 13-57.