Scientists have completed a project to sequence the genomes of 10,000 Indians to build a database that could provide fresh insights into links between genes and health and fuel advances towards personalised precision medicine.
The Indian project — similar to sequencing efforts in other countries — might help pinpoint potentially deleterious genetic mutations associated with specific diseases and provide clues that could be used to develop preventive health strategies or therapy tailored for specific individuals, project scientists have said.
A consortium of scientists from 20 research institutions was engaged in the project funded by the department of biotechnology (DBT), a unit of the Union science ministry, and aimed at genome sequencing 10,000 representative Indians from across the country.
“We have in India more than 4,600 anthropologically well-defined population groups — a diversity of genomes marked by multiple migrations as well as intermixing,” said K. Thangaraj, a scientist at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, a joint coordinator of the project.
The 10,000 genome sequencing effort will provide “a refence genetic database” for Indian populations that can serve as a detailed catalogue of genetic variations found in India, said Y. Narahari, the project’s joint coordinator in the Centre for Brain Science at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
