Genomics for the world

摘要

In the past decade, researchers have dramatically improved our understanding of the genetic basis of complex chronic diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease and type 2 diabetes, through more than 1,000 genome-wide association studies (GWAS). These scan the genomes of thousands of people for known genetic variants, to find out which are associated with a particular condition. Yet the findings from such studies are likely to have less relevance than was previously thought for the world's population as a whole. Ninety-six per cent of subjects included in the GWAS conducted so far are people of European descent~1 (see 'Sampling bias'). And a recent Nature survey suggests that this bias is likely to persist in the upcoming efforts to sequence people's entire genomes2.