Massive DNA sequencing effort reveals how colonization shaped Brazil’s genetic diversity
Source: Science
With people of multiple origins and ethnicities, Brazil has long been recognized as one of the most genetically diverse countries in the world. Now, the largest genomic study of the Brazilian population to date, published today in Science, is painting a clearer picture of how that diversity came to be—and how centuries of colonization, migration, and social dynamics have shaped Brazil’s biology and health.
“I am very pleased that articles like this one that keep coming out of Latin America,” says Andrés Moreno Estrada, a population geneticist at Mexico’s Center for Research and Advanced Studies who was not involved in the study. “These genomic maps are tremendously useful for informing and designing future personalized medicine studies.”
Whereas previous studies had looked at specific populations scattered throughout the country, the current work, which started in 2019, aimed to include communities that have been underrepresented in both national and international genomic studies—mainly Afro-Brazilians and those with Indigenous ancestry. Researchers led by Tábita Hünemeier, a population geneticist at the University of São Paulo, collected and analyzed full genomes from 2111 healthy participants in five different health studies from around the country. The team also collected about 318 samples from Afro-Brazilians participating in a chronic kidney disease study in Porto Alegre, on the southern tip of the country. And using a mobile lab in a boat, they collected 294 more samples from communities with Indigenous ancestry that live along two Amazonian rivers—the Maderia and the Purus—in the north.
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