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Researchers Map Recombination in Khoe-San Population

For a paper in Genome Biology, researchers at Stellenbosch University, the University of California, Davis, and Cape Town's Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology presents evidence of pronounced recombination in the Khoe-San population. As part of a population study of an Indigenous Khoe-San population known as the Nama, the team interrogated recombination and selection patterns in relation to other human populations with whole-genome sequences for 54 Nama individuals. "Despite gene flow from Eastern African pastoralists [around] 2,000 years ago and recent admixture with Europeans, the Nama do not cluster with any of the continental groups that we have representative recombination maps for," the authors write, noting that "their recombination landscape is indeed unique and epidemiological studies that involve the Nama or any other related populations, like other Khoe-San populations or southern African Bantu-speaking groups, would benefit from our inferred map."