
Missing genes point to targets for drug development - sciadvance
https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2017/04/18/missing-genes-point-to-possible-drug-targets/
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iplaw
> One potential way to discover more of these unique individuals is NIH’s new
> All of Us Research Program, which will aim to enroll one million American
> volunteers in a long-term study that will ultimately include DNA sequencing.

This is the first I've heard of this initiative. I hope that it is successful,
but I'm not sure that I will be volunteering.

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pizza
The study focused a lot on consanguinity's effect on genome - I wonder if
there are studies examining children with 'very' unrelated parents, i.e. mixed
race?

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JBReefer
I have 0 support for this, but it the mixed race people I know tend to be
much, much, much healthier. It makes sense when you think about inbreeding,
but it's sort of weird to think about. A friend who is 100% Polish Jewish - a
people who were forced to live in small shtetls and didn't have a wide genetic
pool - just randomly went blind one day. My mixed-race wife is literally never
sick.

I'm kind of jealous to be honest.

~~~
reitanqild
_I have 0 support for this, but it the mixed race people I know tend to be
much, much, much healthier._

Biology has your back on this. (I have farming background but results should
be valid for humans as well.)

~~~
0417_airlines
I'd be interested to see if you can find any evidence for this in human
populations. From my undergraduate classes (and in my admittedly limited
exposure to plant biology), it sounds like you're referring to increased
fitness of plant hybrids.

In this case, you're falling into the mindset I outlined in my other comment.
At least in the simple examples presented at the college biology level,
hybrids often combine true-breeding traits (hypothetically, good growth in a
certain climate, resistance to a certain temperature, etc). It seems
reasonable that an individual with a mixture of such traits would fare better
than its true-bred counterparts.

In humans, our race labels don't correspond to true-bred traits. While some
genetic conditions are most common in certain racial groups, I cannot think of
any set of genes where heterozygotes are only formed by mating across racial
groups.

Note that I'm writing in the US - these points may be less true in homogeneous
countries like Norway. But in such groups, we're not seeing the effect of race
as much as the effect of small groups of human founders.

One interesting point, which could buttress OP's observation, is the finding
that immigrants are often healthier than native born individuals[1]. This
phenomenon occurs across many measures of health; unfortunately for America, a
nation of immigrants, the phenomenon regresses over successive generations.

1\. A discussion of weight and immigration. This is the first link I could
easily find, but I have seen this discussed more convincingly with respect to
low birth weight in African mothers vs Black American mothers:
[https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e645/c696508ccb09cfbd476a86...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e645/c696508ccb09cfbd476a86b17af2562023bf.pdf)

