Geography is a better determinant of human genetic differentiation than ethnicity

@article{Manica2005a, abstract = {Abstract Individuals differ genetically in their susceptibility to particular diseases and their response to drugs. However, personalized treatments are difficult to develop, because disease susceptibility and drug response generally have poorly characterized genetic architecture. It is thus tempting to use the ethnicity of patients to capture some of the variation in allele frequencies at the genes underlying a clinical trait. The success of such a strategy depends on whether human populations can be accurately classified into discrete genetic ethnic groups. Despite the heated discussions and controversies surrounding this issue, there has been essentially no attempt so far to quantify the relative power of ethnic groups and geography at predicting the proportion of shared alleles between human populations. Here, we present the first such quantification using a dataset of 51 populations typed at 377 autosomal microsatellite markers, and show that pair-wise geographic distances across landmasses constitute a far better predictor than ethnicity. Allele-sharing between human populations worldwide decays smoothly with increasing physical distance. We discuss the relevance of these patterns for the expected distribution of variants of medical interest. The distribution patterns of gene coding for simple traits are expected to be highly heterogeneous, as most such genes experienced strong natural selection. However, variants involved in complex traits are expected to behave essentially neutrally, and we expect them to fit closely our predictions based on microsatellites. We conclude that the use of ethnicity alone will often be inadequate as a basis for medical treatment.}, author = {Manica, Andrea and Prugnolle, Franck and Balloux, François }, citeulike-article-id = {1552512}, doi = {10.1007/s00439-005-0039-3}, journal = {Human Genetics}, keywords = {geographic-structure, population-structure, race, str}, month = {December}, number = {3}, pages = {366--371}, posted-at = {2007-08-10 21:34:53}, priority = {2}, title = {Geography is a better determinant of human genetic differentiation than ethnicity}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00439-005-0039-3}, volume = {118}, year = {2005} }

TY - JOUR ID - Manica2005a L3 - citeulike-article-id:1552512 TI - Geography is a better determinant of human genetic differentiation than ethnicity JF - Human Genetics VL - 118 IS - 3 SP - 366 EP - 371 N2 - Abstract Individuals differ genetically in their susceptibility to particular diseases and their response to drugs. However, personalized treatments are difficult to develop, because disease susceptibility and drug response generally have poorly characterized genetic architecture. It is thus tempting to use the ethnicity of patients to capture some of the variation in allele frequencies at the genes underlying a clinical trait. The success of such a strategy depends on whether human populations can be accurately classified into discrete genetic ethnic groups. Despite the heated discussions and controversies surrounding this issue, there has been essentially no attempt so far to quantify the relative power of ethnic groups and geography at predicting the proportion of shared alleles between human populations. Here, we present the first such quantification using a dataset of 51 populations typed at 377 autosomal microsatellite markers, and show that pair-wise geographic distances across landmasses constitute a far better predictor than ethnicity. Allele-sharing between human populations worldwide decays smoothly with increasing physical distance. We discuss the relevance of these patterns for the expected distribution of variants of medical interest. The distribution patterns of gene coding for simple traits are expected to be highly heterogeneous, as most such genes experienced strong natural selection. However, variants involved in complex traits are expected to behave essentially neutrally, and we expect them to fit closely our predictions based on microsatellites. We conclude that the use of ethnicity alone will often be inadequate as a basis for medical treatment. KW - geographic-structure KW - population-structure KW - race KW - str AU - Manica, Andrea AU - Prugnolle, Franck AU - Balloux, François PY - 2005/12/18/ UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00439-005-0039-3 ER -