Nestled amongst subtle genetic differences are clues for why many of us develop diseases, like cancer, and how we respond to medical treatments for them.
We share 99.9% of human DNA — the sequence of genes, or biological information, that allows us to function and live. But the 0.1% of human DNA that differs in each of us can reveal why we have different health outcomes.
There's a lot of research into genetics and genomics as these fields can explain how genes are passed from generation to generation, and how all of our genes together — our genomes — make us more or less likely to develop a disease.
The problem is that more than 80% of genetics studies include only people from European descent. As a result, they represent no more than 20% of the worldwide population. And that is leading to what some experts an injustice in medicine — or a "genomics gap".
"There is an injustice in medicine, particularly in genetics: we know much more about the genetic basis of diseases for people of European ancestry [Europeans or US-whites] than for people with other origins," said Eduardo Tarazona-Santos, a geneticist at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil.
Tarazona-Santos has been working to fix this injustice, gathering data about genetic differences in two indigenous populations in Latin America — one in the Andean highlands and........