The pool of complete human genome sequences just got a bit bigger, thanks to the addition of two men from southern Africa; Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the South African civil-rights activist, and a man named !Gubi, from a Khoisan community in Namibia. Researchers also analyzed partial genomes of three other members of the Khoisan, a collection of hunter-gathererer groups in the Kalahari desert that makes up one of the world’s oldest and most diverse populations. Tutu is Bantu, a group that makes up the majority of the population in southern Africa.
The majority of complete genome sequences to date have come from men of European descent, including scientists James Watson, George Church, and Stephen Quake. But analyzing diverse groups is important for both medical and scientific reasons. People in Africa are known to have high levels of genetic diversity–because the human species originated there, genetic variations have had more time to accumulate.
In the new study, published today in the journal Nature, researchers found that the four Khoisan men are as genetically different as a European and an Asian person. “This is despite the fact that they sometimes live within walking distance of one another,” team leader Stephan Schuster, a genome researcher at the Pennsylvania State University, told Nature. According to the article, “!Gubi’s and Tutu’s genomes each carry more than one million single base-pair changes that are not found in each other or in any of the published genomes, including one from a Yoruba individual from West Africa.”
Don’t settle for half the story.
Get paywall-free access to technology news for the here and now.