Throughout history, most of the world’s genomic research has relied on DNA data from people of European ancestry.
A genome is the full DNA code of about three billion (a thousand million) bases, including all the chromosomes. Each person has two genomes: one from their mother and the other from their father.
Well resourced environments favour European-based research generating hundreds of thousands of whole human genomes with associated health data. Yet modern humans, our species, evolved on the African continent. African populations therefore contain the deepest branches of human genetic history and the greatest genetic diversity on the planet. Yet the continent remains strikingly underrepresented in global genomic databases.
