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Human genomics

Into Africa

Nature Reviews Genetics volume 11, pages 170–171 (2010)Cite this article

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One West African and a few Asian genomes have been published, but most individual genomes sequenced to date belong to individuals of European descent, and most human genetic variation data are from Caucasian individuals. Making an important step towards addressing this discrepancy, Schuster and colleagues used next-generation sequencing to sequence the genomes of a Bushman and a Bantu speaker — the former a hunter-gatherer, the latter a pastoralist — from southern Africa.

Population genetic analysis indicated that the Bushmen are as distinct from Yorubans of the Niger-Congo delta — who have been included in the HapMap Project — as they are from Europeans. Also, comparisons with other human genomes yielded a very high number of novel SNPs, consistent with these individuals coming from genetically divergent populations. For example, the coding regions of an individual of European descent differ from those of an individual of Asian descent on average by 1 nucleotide per kilobase, but the authors found on average 1.2 nucleotide differences per kilobase between two Bushmen. The authors compared the Bushmen sequences with the human and chimpanzee reference sequences and found that most of these novel changes are not ancestral but have accumulated since the divergence of the Bushmen.

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References

ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER

  1. Schuster, S. C. et al. Complete Khoisan and Bantu genomes from southern Africa. Nature18 Feb 2010 (doi:10.1038/nature08795)

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FURTHER READING

  1. Teo, Y.-Y., Small, K. S. & Kwiatkowski, D. P. Methodological challenges of genome-wide association analysis in Africa. Nature Rev. Genet. 11, 149–160 (2010)

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Senior Editor, Nature,

    Magdalena Skipper

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  1. Magdalena Skipper
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Skipper, M. Into Africa. Nat Rev Genet 11, 170–171 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg2758

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg2758

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