Post by atruepatriot on Mar 22, 2020 10:07:52 GMT -8
Global gene sequencing effort tells of our evolutionary past.
By Dyani Lewis
Genomic sequencing of nearly 1000 people – from minority communities often overlooked by geneticists – has provided a glimpse of our species’ history in unprecedented detail.
The genomes – 929 of them in all – represent 54 diverse human populations from around the world.
All were collected as part of the Human Genome Diversity Project, a global effort that started in the 1990s in an attempt to address the bias in genetic databases towards those with European ancestry. This is the first time so many of those samples have been fully sequenced.
Many of the populations represented have unique languages.
“Often language and ancestry go together, so if a group has a very distinct language, they will often also have somewhat distinct genetic history,” explains evolutionary geneticist Anders Bergström from the Wellcome Sanger and Francis Crick Institutes in the UK, who led the study.
Reaching into the far corners of humankind’s diversity revealed a trove of previously unidentified genetic variants, Bergström and his colleagues report in the journal Science.
Across the genome, the team identified millions of genetic variants, including more than 67 million single letter differences, nearly nine million small insertions or deletions, and more than 40,000 changes in sequence copy number.
Hundreds of thousands of these variants hadn’t turned up in other similar sized genome sequencing projects, such as the 1000 Genomes Project. That’s because previous studies have sequenced genomes from people living in large, metropolitan populations, says Bergström.
The sheer volume of new variants identified underscores how much geneticists have been missing by focusing on these predominantly European-ancestry populations.
“Most variants have very little effect on our biology,” says Bergström – but they are a goldmine of information for mapping demographic changes that have occurred during our prehistory.
By looking for genetic variants unique to specific populations or shared with our archaic relatives – the Neanderthals and Denisovans – the researchers discovered that most of the separation between modern-day populations has occurred over the past 250,000 years.
cosmosmagazine.com/biology/diverse-genomes-open-new-window-into-human-history
By Dyani Lewis
Genomic sequencing of nearly 1000 people – from minority communities often overlooked by geneticists – has provided a glimpse of our species’ history in unprecedented detail.
The genomes – 929 of them in all – represent 54 diverse human populations from around the world.
All were collected as part of the Human Genome Diversity Project, a global effort that started in the 1990s in an attempt to address the bias in genetic databases towards those with European ancestry. This is the first time so many of those samples have been fully sequenced.
Many of the populations represented have unique languages.
“Often language and ancestry go together, so if a group has a very distinct language, they will often also have somewhat distinct genetic history,” explains evolutionary geneticist Anders Bergström from the Wellcome Sanger and Francis Crick Institutes in the UK, who led the study.
Reaching into the far corners of humankind’s diversity revealed a trove of previously unidentified genetic variants, Bergström and his colleagues report in the journal Science.
Across the genome, the team identified millions of genetic variants, including more than 67 million single letter differences, nearly nine million small insertions or deletions, and more than 40,000 changes in sequence copy number.
Hundreds of thousands of these variants hadn’t turned up in other similar sized genome sequencing projects, such as the 1000 Genomes Project. That’s because previous studies have sequenced genomes from people living in large, metropolitan populations, says Bergström.
The sheer volume of new variants identified underscores how much geneticists have been missing by focusing on these predominantly European-ancestry populations.
“Most variants have very little effect on our biology,” says Bergström – but they are a goldmine of information for mapping demographic changes that have occurred during our prehistory.
By looking for genetic variants unique to specific populations or shared with our archaic relatives – the Neanderthals and Denisovans – the researchers discovered that most of the separation between modern-day populations has occurred over the past 250,000 years.
cosmosmagazine.com/biology/diverse-genomes-open-new-window-into-human-history