Novel type 2 diabetes genetic study involves 5 major ancestry groups

Sciencecodex: November 9, 2012

A consortium of scientists who are taking a novel approach in their research to detect the genetic variations that predispose individuals to type 2 diabetes provided an update of their findings at the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) 2012 meeting.

Among the project’s novel characteristics is the ethnic diversity of the 10,000 individuals whose exomes, the 18,000 protein-coding genes, are being sequenced.

The researchers recruited 5,000 individuals with type 2 diabetes (T2D) from five major ancestry groups: African-American, East Asian, European, Hispanic and South Asian. The study population also includes an equal number of controls, individuals from these same ancestry groups who do not have T2D.

“Our hypothesis is that screening the exome in a range of diverse ethnic groups increases the range of variants of each gene surveyed, and thereby improves our ability to detect genes showing differences in the patterns of the DNA codes for proteins between individuals with type 2 diabetes and controls,” said T.M. Teslovich, Ph.D., research fellow in statistical genetics at the University of Michigan, who presented the study at ASHG 2012.

The study is one of the three projects under the umbrella of the NIH-sponsored T2D-GENES (Type 2 Diabetes Genetic Exploration by Next-generation sequencing in multi-Ethnic Samples) study.

The scientists’ approach also will enable them to determine whether there are T2D risk variants that are unique to an ancestry group.

An initial analysis of the data on 3,500 African-American, East Asian and South Asian individuals identified about 1.6 million single nucleotide variants (SNVs), 71.5% of which were previously unknown.  Read more

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