Hyderabad, March 5 -- Persistent practice of endogamy-marrying within small communities-is the primary cause of population-specific diseases in India, according to a recent study led by Dr. K. Thangaraj, CSIR Bhatnagar Fellow at the CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad.
Earlier studies have shown many population-specific hereditary diseases, and such diseases are most often associated with novel genetic mutations.
However, in the recent study findings published in the Journal of Genetics and Genomics, 281 high-coverage whole exome sequences from four anthropologically distinct populations were analysed.
We examined several key factors, such as the extent of inbreeding and novel genetic variants in populations....