Nearly 70% of the samples in the Human Cell Atlas, one of biology's flagship reference maps, carry no record of the donor's ancestry at all. Among the samples that do, people of European ancestry appear roughly six times more often than global population figures would predict.
That is the result of an audit led by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, published July 20 in Cell Genomics. The team examined more than 13,500 samples across three major consortia and compared each against global population data, US cancer incidence and disease-specific references.
