Melanoma Antigen Family E2 (MAGEE2)

A nonsense SNP in the MAGEE2 gene, displayed the highest Fst value, a measure of population differentiation, due to a high frequency of the stop allele in Asian and South American populations and its virtual absence from European and African populations. The geographic distribution suggested that the stop allele likely arose before the exit of humans from Africa about 50 thousand years ago. The MAGEE2 transcript containing the nonsense SNP was predicted to evade nonsense-mediated decay and encode a protein truncated by about 77%. Resequencing the MAGEE2 gene in 91 individuals from African (YRI and LKW), European (CEU), and Asian (CHB) HapMap populations and 1 chimpanzee revealed a total of 43 SNPs, and the haplotypes carrying the stop allele were much less diverse than the others.