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Letter

Nature Genetics 39, 1251–1255 (1 October 2007) | doi:10.1038/ng2116

Measurement of the human allele frequency spectrum demonstrates greater genetic drift in East Asians than in Europeans

Alon Keinan , James C Mullikin , Nick Patterson & David Reich

Large data sets on human genetic variation have been collected recently, but their usefulness for learning about history and natural selection has been limited by biases in the ways polymorphisms were chosen. We report large subsets of SNPs from the International HapMap Project that allow us to overcome these biases and to provide accurate measurement of a quantity of crucial importance for understanding genetic variation: the allele frequency spectrum.