Since the Human Genome Project was completed, scientists around the world have worked tirelessly to populate the sequence and variant databases that have become the crown jewels of genomics research. These databases are now brimming with genomic information, but unfortunately, they are greatly biased towards individuals of European descent. For example, 70 percent of the data stored in the Genome-wide Association Study (GWAS) Catalog, a publicly available resource that contains manually curated array-based data from more than 2,800 published studies, is from individuals of European descent. The other 30 percent comes from individuals with Asian ancestry. Similarly, the database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP) and the Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD) are lacking data from individuals hailing from the Middle East, Central Asia, Oceania, and Africa.
European countries such as Iceland, Estonia, and the UK are among the first to launch countrywide whole genome sequencing efforts. Hence, it’s no surprise that ...
