Implications of Genetic Diversity in MexicoPosted in Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, Mexico on 2014-07-01 01:13Z by Steven |
Implications of Genetic Diversity in Mexico
Biopolitical Times
Center for Genetics and Society
2014-06-25
Pete Shanks
The category Latino is a valid cultural artifact, and often self-identified. But it’s not really a race in any modern sense of the term, and the genetic evidence surely shows that it is far too broad a grouping to be scientifically appropriate without serious qualification. Yet it is used, even in some current peer-reviewed papers.
One that does not use the term is an article published in Science this month on the genetics of Mexico. The country’s population is large and ethnically, linguistically, geographically, economically and culturally diverse. It is also genetically complex, and this article by a large and distinguished team of scientists provides new details. It also suggests some important implications for genomic research and likely for personalized medicine in general:
The genetics of Mexico recapitulates Native American substructure and affects biomedical traits
The study included 511 Native Mexican individuals from 20 indigenous groups, and 500 mestizo (mixed-race) individuals from ten states; nearly a million SNPs were analyzed for each. The variation was striking…
Read the entire article here.