A few years ago, a new paper, SLC24A5, a putative cation exchanger, affects pigmentation in zebrafish and humans, made some waves. It used zebrafish to elucidate the genetics of a locus, SLC24A5, which is responsible for 1/3 of the between population difference between Europeans and Africans in skin color. In short, Europeans are fixed for a derived variant, and Africans and East Asians for an ancestral one. Additionally, SLC24A5 shows up in tests for very recent (last 10,000 years) selection, and is implicated in 1/3 of the skin color variation in South Asians. Today, a similar paper which focuses on KITLG, cis-Regulatory Changes in Kit Ligand Expression and Parallel Evolution of Pigmentation in Sticklebacks and Humans:
Here we use genetic crosses in sticklebacks to investigate the parallel origin of pigmentation changes in natural populations...In humans, Europeans and East Asians also share derived alleles at the KITLG locus. Strong signatures of ...
