Human Genome Diversity Project - Potential Benefits

Potential Benefits

The scientific community has used the HGDP data to study human migration, mutation rates, relationships between different populations, genes involved in height, selective pressure. HGDP has been instrumental to assess human diversity, and to provide information about similarities and differences in human populations. The HGDP is the project with the largest scope of all the several human diversity databases available.

So far there has been 148 papers published using the HGDP datase. Authors using HGDP data work in the US, Russia, Brasil, Ireland, Portugal, France, and other countries.

More specifically HGDP data has been used in studies in evolution and expansion of modern humans.

Diversity research is relevant in various fields of study ranging from disease surveillance to anthropology. Genome-wide-association studies (GWAS) try to associate a genetic mutation with a disease; it is becoming clear that these associations are population dependent and understanding human diversity will be a major step to increase the power to find associated genes with disease.

To gain a full assessment of human development scientists must engage in diversity research. This research needs to be conducted as quickly as possible before small native populations such as those in South America become extinct.

Another benefit of genomic diversity mapping would be in disease research. Diversity research could help explain why certain ethnic populations are vulnerable or resistant to certain diseases and how populations have adapted to these vulnerabilities (see race in biomedicine).

The study of human populations has been at the forefront of genomic and clinical research since the human genome project was completed. Similar projects to HGDP are the 1000 genomes, and the HapMap project. Each one has its own specificities and has been used to scientists to a large extent in overlapping purposes.