the hazaras are in the database because they sampled various pakistani groups, and i guess there were some pakistani hazaras that they got. the two axes are basically west-east and north-south in eurasia. the hazaras clearly have substantial mongol ancestry admixed with persian & northwest south asian lineages. so they are between west and east eurasians, and pulled a touch south.

Also, I gotta say, from personal experience over the past 4 years volunteering for bone marrow drives, brown people do NOT even entertain the idea of registering. That includes south american brown and south asian brown.

the first component of variance always separates africans from non-africans. here’s a PCA i generated from my own pooled data set:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/files/2011/02/HGDPme.png

africans are more diverse than south asians. they’re more diverse than anyone else. in some ways you can model all non-africans as a subset of northeast african. the main exception to this is the 4% neandertal in all non-africans, as well as the 4-6% other hominid in on top of the neandertal among oceanians.

please stop responding to the “concern troll.”

He could be a researcher. Computer sciences and biological sciences are linked, especially genomics which is heavily computational in nature and an interdisciplinary field – people approach it with backgrounds in engineering, physiology, neural sciences, biochem, etc…

hey, i don’t know this guy and i have no clue why he’s collecting raw DNA samples, but i’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt is all.

@Razib – Just curious, where would sub-saharan Africans fall on the PCA plot? In regards to homogeneity, are they more/less/just as diverse as South Asians? thanks

zackandamber.blogspot is where I started blogging almost a decade ago. I moved to my own domain in May 2003 and lost control of the blogspot URL soon after. I have no idea whose blog that is now. And I have no link to the Google cached page you linked to.

You’re asking for SNP (“1 million SNP will cost…”), here is what is says about it on wikipedia: Variations in the DNA sequences of humans can affect how humans develop diseases and respond to pathogens, chemicals, drugs, vaccines, and other agents. SNPs are also thought to be key enablers in realizing the concept of personalized medicine.

You cited Human Genome Diversity Project as lacking data on Indians, here is wikipedia: In 1995, the National Research Council (NRC) issued its recommendations on the HGDP. While the NRC endorsed the concept of diversity research, it criticized the HGDP’s procedure, claiming that the HGDP had too many ethical lapses and problems. The NRC report suggested several alternatives such as doing sampling anonymously (i.e. sampling genetic data without tying it to specific racial groups). … such approaches would eliminate the concerns discussed below (regarding racism, weapons development, etc.)….

It goes on to say that there were reports that funding for it had been drained due to protests based on ethics.

While there are no Ashkenazi samples in HGDP, there are other studies and papers about Jewish genetics and data is available publicly. For example, Behar et al has Jewish samples from a number of regions.

no, it’s not plausible. if you knew of the difficulties of designing and deploying bioweapons you wouldn’t find it plausible at all. but you don’t know enough to make an informed assessment. instead, you’re leaning on generalities. that’s fine, you’re free to express your opinion. but stop repeating yourself now.

If this data could help in understanding why “different ethnic groups have different responses to various drugs, not to mention divergent health risks” – your words then weaponizing a drug to target, or at the very least pose significantly more health risks, to certain ethnic groups (more than others) is plausible.

In a terrorist hell hole like South Asia, where environmental monitoring is non-existent, this data could pose significant risks to the population there.

http://religions.pewforum.org/comparisons

click “importance of religion in one’s life.”

all that being said, it is laughable to say that south asians are well versed in genetics. they have a lot of interest in folk taxonomy, but it isn’t grounded in the new genomics. i try to bring some of that in the comments here, and now i’m pushing in on the front pages.

i understand that are long recurrent themes on this weblog in relation to racism and ethnocentrism. additionally, there are real substantive concerns (not just paranoid fantasies as comment #1) re: genetic privacy. but i’d ask readers to hold off on those issue for now, since they’re mooted regularly here and elsewhere. rather, i’m open to questions about what a PCA plot means, how south asians relate genomically to each other and to other populations, as entailed by the newest science.