Basi genetiche dell’adattamento alle basse pressioni di ossigeno in popolazioni di alta quota delle Ande peruviane.

High-altitude is the only environment colonized by modern humans where no behavioral buffering is available to face the peculiar and unavoidable stress: hypoxia. Life at low oxygen pressure needs specific biological adaptations to deliver enough oxygen to maintain aerobic metabolism. In the last decades many studies investigated the relationship between altitude and adaptive phenotypic traits, but to date no association between genetic variants and adaptive traits to hypoxia-related stress have been found in native American highlands. Here we aim at identifying the genetic bases of human adaptation to high altitude by studying the evolution of candidate genes and investigating their genetic variation in Andean native populations. The hypoxia inducible factors (HIF-1