Category Archives: Genetics

The new paper, 50,000 years of Evolutionary History of India: Insights from ~2,700 Whole Genome Sequences, is very good. It also answers a question that comes up sometimes: how different are West Bengalis from Bangladeshis? We haven’t had a apples to apples comparison until this paper that’s easy to understand. There are figures in the … Continue reading Bengalis are all basically very similar (except for Brahmins)

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Reconstructing the population history of Sinhalese, the major ethnic group in Śrī Laṅkā: Interestingly, we found an unexpected excess of smaller chunks sharing between Marāṭhā and Sinhala (>16%) than the Marāṭhā and STU, thus supporting the linguistic hypothesis of Geiger, Turner and van Driem. To confirm the excess sharing, we looked for the population which … Continue reading Sri Lanka Genetics

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Probably the most famous Brazil American is Gisele Bündchen, erstwhile supermodel and ex-wife of Tom Brady. Bündchen is a German Brazilian, and all the media I see say she is […]

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https://medium.com/media/703b1c9872ad474e6f2037e17ac20c1b/hrefThis weekend Amandra Vondras, GenRAIT’s Director of Science, went on David McKay’s podcast, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants. She discussed her background as a molecular biologist, her pa…

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The full version of this paper is out, South Asian medical cohorts reveal strong founder effects and high rates of homozygosity. It’s not the best for understanding population structure because they focus on within South Asia variation, but it does seem to confirm that among Bengalis there is a cline from west to east, irrespective … Continue reading Population structure in South Asian – Genomes Asian 1K paper

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An age of forensic genomicsJoseph James DeAngeloThe Golden State Killer, a sinister figure who terrorized Californians between 1974 and 1986, was apprehended on April 24, 2018. This elusive predator, known by various monikers such as the East Area Rapi…

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On April 25th, 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick published Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid. This paper helped Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins win the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1962 (Rosalind Franklin…

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On the limits of fitting complex models of population history to f-statistics: These results show that at least with regard to the AG analysis, a key historical conclusion of the study (that the predominant genetic component in the Indus Periphery lineage diverged from the Iranian clade prior to the date of the Ganj Dareh Neolithic … Continue reading Perhaps the Indus Valley Civilization did descend from Zagrosian farmers?

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This piece arguing for the end to cousin marriage in the UK in The Times (driven by Pakistanis) took me to a paper in PLOS One, Genetic and reproductive consequences of consanguineous marriage in Bangladesh: The mean prevalence of CM in our studied population was 6.64%. Gross fertility was higher among CM families, as compared … Continue reading Cousin marriage in Bangladesh

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More than 40 years ago my mother got a shocking result in her yearly check-up when she was a new immigrant to the US: she had very high cholesterol. The doctors were perplexed, because she was thin and did not have a cholesterol-heavy diet (remember wh…

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If you were in and around genetics laboratories in the early 2010’s, one thing would be immediately apparent: CRISPR was going to revolutionize the field. Many research groups were shifting from their long-preferred genetic engineering techniques to th…

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What do we plan to do about it?Most of you have probably seen the NHGRI chart that illustrates the crash in the sequencing cost per human genome. To get some perspective, it cost $3 billion to sequence the first human genome over ten years in the year …

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Furthering the life science data revolution in plant and animal genomicsRazib Khan, Taylor Capito, and Santanu Das at PAG 30During the second week of January 2023, the GenRAIT leadership team attended the Plant & Animal Genome Conference in San Die…

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A Maharashtra Deshastha Brahmin sent me his sample. He plots with the Maharashtra Kayastha. He’s much more like a South Indian Brahmin than a North Indian Brahmin. The Maharashtra Saraswat Brahmin seems more north shifted.

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There are 20 million Hui people in China. These are traditionally Chinese-speaking Muslims. Though they are found in every region of China (and in the Chinese Diaspora), they are concentrated […]

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I got a sample from someone where one parent was a West Bengal Sagdop, and another parent a Baidya with family origins in East Bengal. One hypothesis that I’ve see is that Baidya are basically Brahmins who lost their caste. Genetically this does not seem to be the case. Bengali Brahmins shift considerably toward the … Continue reading Merry Christmas!

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The mitochondrial genomes of two Pre-historic Hunter Gatherers in Sri Lanka: Sri Lanka is an island in the Indian Ocean connected by the sea routes of the Western and Eastern worlds. Although settlements of anatomically modern humans date back to 48,000 years, to date there is no genetic information on pre-historic individuals in Sri Lanka. … Continue reading First AASI mtDNA genomes from Sri Lanka (2500 and 5500 BC)

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I noticed something interesting a few weeks ago in the supplements of the Genomes Asian 1000K paper. Look at where the Toda are on the PCA. Now look at the Indus Valley samples I have…. I don’t have access to the Toda samples. But there’s a lot of evidence that this is a very unique … Continue reading The Todas are more like IVC people than anyone else

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Razib Khan