Healthcare’s standard genome is mostly based on one American. As we enter the era of personalised medicine, this bias has drawbacks for much of the world’s population
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Those databases will illuminate studies of human variation worldwide, in part because the great genomic diversity in Africans can uncover spurious links to medical conditions, explains Concepcion Nierras, an NIH Common Fund geneticist. For example, in Europeans a rare variant of a gene for a low-density lipoprotein that contributes to high cholesterol seemed to raise the risk of heart disease. But Fatumo and his colleagues found that among Africans, the variant was common even in those who did not have heart disease, suggesting it may not have clinical relevance. The
Nature paper uncovered 54 such variants that now need re-evaluation.
February 2, 2021
By Deborah Borfitz
February 2, 2021 | The Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) Consortium is endeavoring to foster collaborative research on the world’s second-most populous continent, having spent the past decade bolstering the genomics research capacity here with 48 projects across 34 countries. Clinical geneticist and physician-scientist Neil Hanchard, M.D., Ph.D., through his academic position at Baylor College of Medicine, has, for example, been involved in a H3Africa-sponsored genomic study in children coinfected with HIV and tuberculosis whose principal investigator is based in Botswana.
Most recently, Hanchard was one of the senior authors on an H3Africa-sponsored study published in