The Missing landscape of human genomic diversity in the Arabian Peninsula
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Abstract
The Arabian Peninsula (AP) is the first site of human migration and habitation outside of Africa. As a major crossroad for human populations, the AP provides an opportunity to better understand early to modern changes in human demographic patterns through selections, admixture, gene flow, and migration. Dramatic climatic fluctuations have been recorded in the AP that contributed to contractions and expansions in water availability. These climatological perturbations are thought to have shaped genomic variations in this population. Recent reports indicate that a number of Arab nation-states have committed significant resources to genetically type the national population, with the overall goal of determining the degree of genomic diversity in the AP. We sought to characterize currently typed genomic variation in Arabian populations to support the rationale for our proposed analyses of Saudi Arabian genomic diversity. Interestingly, in contrast to published claims , a comprehensive search of peer-reviewed reports on genomic analysis (N=20 papers) revealed no genomic data from four national genomic projects (Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and The United Arab Emirates). Our analysis demonstrates that while much fanfare and presumably resources have been devoted to defining the genomic landscape of the Arabian peoples, little actual data is available to either substantiate or support such an investment.
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2017. The Missing landscape of human genomic diversity in the Arabian Peninsula. PeerJ Preprints 5:e3039v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3039v1Author comment
Poster presentation for the open symposium of SMBE 2017.This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.
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Competing Interests
There are no competing interests.
Author Contributions
Njlaa Bakhsh conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables.
Fatimah Jackson reviewed drafts of the paper.
Latifa Jackson conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper.
Christopher cross wrote the paper.
Data Deposition
The following information was supplied regarding data availability:
The research in this article did not generate any data or code.
Funding
The authors received no funding for this work.
