Looking at Diversity

Researchers are hoping to capture some of the diversity seen in Latin Americans through the new Slim Initiative for Genomic Health between the Broad Institute and Mexico City's Carlos Slim Health Institute, says MIT's Technology Review. That project is still in the planning stages — though it will include gene sequencing and microarray-based studies — but INMEGEN published a Mexican version of the HapMap last year. "We can clearly see different components in the admixture pattern in the Mexican population," says Gerardo Jimenez-Sanchez, former director of INMEGEN. "We can also observe that the Mexican population is a range of admixture from those individuals who are very European to those who are very indigenous." Jimenez-Sanchez adds that "if personalized medicine is going to become a global phenomenon, then scientists need to understand the genomes of all the world's population."