Indian Genetic Material is DIfferent from Rest of World but Similar within

This was an extensive effort that was undertaken within the US of the Indian Americans. What it shows are two things:

1. Indians have a genetic make-up that is different from the rest of the people of the world
2. The Genetic Material within India is not too differentiated

This should be seen in view of the migration pattern of the human population that has been mapped based on the genetic material.

It opens up a lot of questions for this study and others:

– If as the migration patterns show the “Indian” strain also went to Europe and Australia then how come the Indian genetics is peculiar to India?
– If the Indian genetic material across the entire geography of the subcontinent is so similar then what is the relevance of the Aryan-Dravidian theory??

Also, it is important to remember that the Indian civilization did spread unto the areas in what later became Persia and Afghanistan. So the stream that you see in the image going onto the Europe was actually the Indian stream itself!

Good questions that need to be explored as this study of genetics goes on…

Indians make up one of the major human ancestry groups, with relatively little genetic differentiation among the people from different parts of the country, according to a new US study.

Although the study used participants that may not reflect a random sample from India, these results still suggest that the frequencies of many genetic variants are distinctive in India compared to other parts of the world, an Indian American scientist who led the study said.

“We were struck both by the low level of diversity amongst people spanning such a large geographical region, and by the fact that people of the Indian sub-continent constituted a distinct group when compared to populations from other parts of the world,” said Pragna I. Patel.

The study led by Patel, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC), represents the largest study of Indian genetic variation performed to date, in terms of the total number of sites in the human genome that were surveyed.

Her group is using this study as a foundation for future studies on the genetic basis of various common diseases in Asian Indians – such as heart disease, which is highly prevalent in this population.

For their study, Patel and Noah Rosenberg, assistant professor in the department of Human Genetics at the University of Michigan, conducted genetic analysis of Indian-born individuals in the US. Their studies of 1,200 genome-wide polymorphisms collected from 432 individuals representing 15 different Indian populations, have begun to shed light on the genetic variations of the diverse population of India.