Australian Indigenous genomes are highly diverse and unlike those anywhere else

From Nature, 13 December 2023:

Australian Indigenous communities from different regions in the north and centre of the country are some of the most genetically distinct people on the planet, according to a pair of studies published in Nature today. Indigenous Australian communities have the highest rate of genetic variation outside people in Africa.

Hundreds of thousands of human genomes have been sequenced since the Human Genome Project was launched in 1990, yet very few of these genomes are from Indigenous Australians.

“The history of genetic research has not proven to be kind to the interests of Indigenous and other diverse communities around the globe,” says study co-author Alex Brown, an Indigenous Australian from the Yuin nation and director of the National Centre for Indigenous Genomics at the Australian National University in Canberra.

As a result, Indigenous Australians are substantially under-represented in the genomic data sets that now underpin much research in medicine. Read more …