common hla alleles associated with health, but not with facial attractiveness常见的hla等位基因与健康有关,但不是面部吸引力.pdfVIP

Common HLA Alleles Associated with Health, but Not with Facial Attractiveness 1 2 1 2 3 4 Vinet Coetzee *, Louise Barrett , Jaco M. Greeff , S. Peter Henzi , David I. Perrett , Ahmed A. Wadee 1 Department of Genetics, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa, 2 Department of Psychology, University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, Canada, 3 Department of Psychology, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Scotland, 4 Department of Immunology, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa Three adaptive hypotheses have been proposed to explain the link between the human leucocyte antigen (HLA) genes, health measures and facial attractiveness: inbreeding avoidance, heterozygote advantage and frequency-dependent selection. This paper reports findings that support a new hypothesis relating HLA to health. We suggest a new method to quantify the level of heterozygosity. HLA heterozygosity did not significantly predict health measures in women, but allele frequency did. Women with more common HLA alleles reported fewer cold and flu bouts per year, fewer illnesses in the previous year and rated themselves healthier than women with rare alleles. To our knowledge, this is the first study to show a positive correlation between HLA allele frequency and general health measures. We propose that certain common HLA alleles confer resistance to prevalent pathogens. Nevertheless, neither HLA heterozygosity nor allele frequency significantly predicted how healthy or attractive men rated the female volunteers. Three non-mutually exclusive explanations are put forward to explain this finding. Citation: Coetzee V, Barrett L, Greeff JM, Henzi SP, Perrett DI, et al (2007) Common HLA Alleles Associated with Health, but Not with Facial Attractiveness. PLoS ONE 2(7): e640.