A few weeks ago I hinted at a South Asian equivalent to Dodecad & Eurogenes BGA. It is now public and in the data collection phase. You can read the whole thing here:
http://www.zackvision.com/weblog/2011/01/harappa-ancestry-project
This is the feed:
http://www.zackvision.com/feed/
If your ancestry is from these nations:
Afghanistan
Bangladesh
Bhutan
Burma
India
Iran
Maldives
Nepal
Pakistan
Sri Lanka
Tibet
Read on! If not, “for entertainment purposes only”….
I have been griping in public and in private about the “reference” populations used for South Asian genomics for years. Because of the Permit Raj the HGDP had to use Pakistani populations. Additionally, because of the HGDP’s mandate to focus on smaller groups which might harbor genetic uniqueness you have some very obscure tribes, but only one sample set from an Indo-Aryan speaking population. And even there, it was a minority, not the Punjabi speaking majority of Pakistan.
Some of this has changed in recent years. Papers such as Reconstructing Indian History and Genetic diversity in India and the inference of Eurasian population expansion have added more populations to the mix. The current phase of the HapMap has Gujaratis from Houston. But there is always a problem when you take a small population set to be representative of a broader group. There are ~1.3 …