4 ms·
If you make a connection between genes and disease, it is often a complex/weak link. Most of the on/off genes have already been discovered, by now we have gotte
by aswegs8 5y ago
If you make a connection between genes and disease, it is often a complex/weak link. Most of the on/off genes have already been discovered, by now we have gotten down to the more complex ones based on interactions, etc.
Having worked with genetic data a lot I know that the reason for the wealth of European genetic data therefore lies in the limited generalizability based on more diverse datasets.
If you try to generalize from a worldwide genetic dataset, you will probably fail. Your inferences from this diverse dataset to individual genomes will be abysmal. Predictions are already difficult to make from a country-specific dataset to an inhabitant of such country.
I don't know why people always want to see race everywhere. For scientific reasons, it has been way more convenient to sequence more people of European origin. In my opinion, that has nothing to do with racism. It is a matter of what data has better availability and is more valuable right now (not even in terms of application - simply in terms of being able to detect complex underlying patterns).
Now that the cost of sequencing is getting lower and lower and availability increases everywhere, it is great to see more diverse genomes sequenced. This will help us understand more of the genome - still, this is no magic bullet by a long shot. The problems stated above get bigger with dissimilarity. Many discoveries made in African genomes can probably not be generalized unto the remaining world.
Current methods are just not sufficient to dig deep into the genome and its mechanics. At this point, we would probably need to sequence the whole of earths population a few times to be able to make consistently accurate and significant predictions across many complex traits and diseases.
- AlotOfReading 5y ago> For scientific reasons, it has been way more convenient to sequence more people of European origin. I'm personally interested in human origins, so from my perspective yet another "convenience" dataset from Europe is nearly useless. There's a lot more reasons to build this than just the search for medical magic bullets.
- nextaccountic 5y agoThere is more genetic variability within Africa than the whole rest of world combined https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article/study-africans-more-genetically-diverse-rest-world https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article/study-africans-mo... That's a scientific reason to sequence the genes of African people more.
- float4 5y agoAnd that causes the problem that the parent describes: greater variability makes it harder to find useful patterns.
- wesleywt 5y agoA dataset with no variability makes it impossible to find any useful pattern. You are only counting the blue M&Ms in the jar. > Europeans are not clones In terms of genetic diversity, yes, they are. I don't know where you get your opinion from, but in science, the more representitive the scientific sample of the population is better the statistical analysis of that population. A European/Asian only dataset it not representative of the actual human genetic diversity.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- float4 5y agoAccidentally removed my comment when I wanted to reply, but whatever. I never said that we can infer everything from European data. I never said collecting African genetic data is pointless. I know that Europeans do not vary nearly as much from a genetic standpoint as Africans (although they're definitely not clones). I know you can't generalise using European/Asian data. I know larger samples describe the population better. All I said is that it's easier to analyse data that is less variable, and that Europeans aren't clones. Both points are true. Finding patterns is more difficult when there is more variance in the data. That doesn't mean it's pointless, it's actually more useful, but it's also more difficult.
- x86_64Ubuntu 5y agoWhy are we clinging to "generalizability"?
- wesleywt 5y agoThe European datasets are essentially useless because they lack diversity. So you cannot make any generalisations. You need a highly diverse dataset to start looking for patterns of expression in subgroups to draw any meaningful conclusions. Just to add to this. I work adjacent to a lab developing forensic kits for black South African populations. The kits developed in the US and Europe don't really work on Xhosa or Zulu populations. This is incredibly important due to the high levels of gender violence in the country.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- x86_64Ubuntu 5y agoIf generalizability wasn't an issue in studying European groups, why is it one when studying African groups?
- thylacine222 5y agoGreat. Maybe the availability of data that isn't easily analyzable by GWAS will finally move genomics away from correlational studies and towards actually trying to understand causation.