Category: Genetics
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Why There Will Not Be a Beige Future
Skin colour, genetics, race, and racism.
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Bengalis are not totally Burmese in their East Asian ancestry
Though Burmese are a good donor for the Tibeto-Burman in Burmese, it seems pretty clear now that I have Tibetan samples that the Bangladeshi samples are a bit more Tibetan-skewed than these Burmese samples. It may be that the early admixture into Bengal was from a Burmese population that had admixed less with the Austro-Asiatic…
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Tibeto-Burman admixture into Bengalis
Doing some reading about the Tibetans for a post for my Substack, and I decide to look around and find some Tibetan genotypes. I went back to a question that has come up before, who contributed the East Asian ancestry into Bengalis? Austro-Asiatics or…
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Should we Invest in Curing Rare Diseases or Making Them Rarer?
An guest-post from Noor Siddiqui and Nikki Teran of Orchid Rare diseases cost Americans around 8 trillion dollars a year. About half of that is direct medical costs. If families are […]
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Brown Pundits Podcast 100: The origin of Indo-Europeans and Indians
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Elamo-Dravidian and the Koraga
Novel 4,400-year-old ancestral component in a tribe speaking a Dravidian language: Research has shown that the present-day population on the Indian subcontinent derives its ancestry from at least three components identified with pre-Indo-Iranian agriculturalists once inhabiting the Iranian plateau, pastoralists originating from the Pontic-Caspian steppe and ancient hunter-gatherer related to the Andamanese Islanders. The present-day…
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Razib Khan Answers My Most Controversial Questions About Genetics: Quillette Cetera Episode 30
A conversation with geneticist and writer Razib Khan.
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Bengalis are all basically very similar (except for Brahmins)
The new paper, 50,000 years of Evolutionary History of India: Insights from ~2,700 Whole Genome Sequences, is very good. It also answers a question that comes up sometimes: how different are West Bengalis from Bangladeshis? We haven’t had a apples to apples comparison until this paper that’s easy to understand. There are figures in the…
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Sri Lanka Genetics
Reconstructing the population history of Sinhalese, the major ethnic group in Śrī Laṅkā: Interestingly, we found an unexpected excess of smaller chunks sharing between Marāṭhā and Sinhala (>16%) than the Marāṭhā and STU, thus supporting the linguistic hypothesis of Geiger, Turner and van Driem. To confirm the excess sharing, we looked for the population which…
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People in Brazil are quite “mixed-race”
Probably the most famous Brazil American is Gisele Bündchen, erstwhile supermodel and ex-wife of Tom Brady. Bündchen is a German Brazilian, and all the media I see say she is […]
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Dr. Amanda Vondras: standing on the shoulders of giants
https://medium.com/media/703b1c9872ad474e6f2037e17ac20c1b/hrefThis weekend Amandra Vondras, GenRAIT’s Director of Science, went on David McKay’s podcast, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants. She discussed her background as a molecular biologist, her pa…
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Population structure in South Asian – Genomes Asian 1K paper
The full version of this paper is out, South Asian medical cohorts reveal strong founder effects and high rates of homozygosity. It’s not the best for understanding population structure because they focus on within South Asia variation, but it does seem to confirm that among Bengalis there is a cline from west to east, irrespective…
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The age of forensic genomics
An age of forensic genomicsJoseph James DeAngeloThe Golden State Killer, a sinister figure who terrorized Californians between 1974 and 1986, was apprehended on April 24, 2018. This elusive predator, known by various monikers such as the East Area Rapi…
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70 years since Watson and Crick publish the structure of DNA
On April 25th, 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick published Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid. This paper helped Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins win the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1962 (Rosalind Franklin…
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Perhaps the Indus Valley Civilization did descend from Zagrosian farmers?
On the limits of fitting complex models of population history to f-statistics: These results show that at least with regard to the AG analysis, a key historical conclusion of the study (that the predominant genetic component in the Indus Periphery lineage diverged from the Iranian clade prior to the date of the Ganj Dareh Neolithic…
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Cousin marriage in Bangladesh
This piece arguing for the end to cousin marriage in the UK in The Times (driven by Pakistanis) took me to a paper in PLOS One, Genetic and reproductive consequences of consanguineous marriage in Bangladesh: The mean prevalence of CM in our studied population was 6.64%. Gross fertility was higher among CM families, as compared…
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Precise medicine is accurate medicine
More than 40 years ago my mother got a shocking result in her yearly check-up when she was a new immigrant to the US: she had very high cholesterol. The doctors were perplexed, because she was thin and did not have a cholesterol-heavy diet (remember wh…
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CRISPR/Cas9: the genetic engineering century
If you were in and around genetics laboratories in the early 2010’s, one thing would be immediately apparent: CRISPR was going to revolutionize the field. Many research groups were shifting from their long-preferred genetic engineering techniques to th…
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Genomic data “eating the world”
What do we plan to do about it?Most of you have probably seen the NHGRI chart that illustrates the crash in the sequencing cost per human genome. To get some perspective, it cost $3 billion to sequence the first human genome over ten years in the year …
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GenRAIT goes to PAG 30
Furthering the life science data revolution in plant and animal genomicsRazib Khan, Taylor Capito, and Santanu Das at PAG 30During the second week of January 2023, the GenRAIT leadership team attended the Plant & Animal Genome Conference in San Die…