FLICKR, EMMANUEL DYANWhole-genome sequences from 128 healthy Jewish people could help the medical community identify disease-associated variants in those of Ashkenazi ancestry, according to a study published today (September 9) in Nature Communications. The library of sequences also confirms earlier conclusions about Ashkenazi history hinted at by more limited DNA sequencing studies. For instance, the sequences point to an approximate 350-person bottleneck in the Ashkenazi population as recently as 700 years ago, and suggest that the population has a mixture of European and Middle Eastern ancestry.
The study “provides a very nice reference panel for the very unique population of Ashkenazi Jews,” said Alon Keinan, who studies human population genomics at Cornell University in New York. Keinan is acknowledged in the study but was not involved in the research.
“One might have thought that, after many years of genetic studies relating to Ashkenazi Jews . . . there would be little room for additional insights,” Karl Skorecki of the Rambam Healthcare Campus in Israel who also was not involved in the study wrote in an e-mail to The Scientist. The study, he added, provides “a powerful further validation and further resolution of the demographic history of the Ashkenazi Jews in relation to non-Jewish Europeans that is reassuringly consistent with inferences drawn ...
