The promise of discovering population-specific disease-associated genes in South Asia

Kumarasamy Thangaraj, David Reich and colleagues identify 81 South Asian groups descended from extreme founder events, including 14 with a census size of over 1 million people, thus providing an opportunity to test for and decrease the burden of recessive genetic diseases in these populations. The more than 1.5 billion people who live in South Asia are correctly viewed not as a single large population but as many small endogamous groups. We...