Hunting and gathering and sequencing
Four indigenous Namibian hunter-gatherers !Gubi, G/aq’o, D#kgao and !A?ˆ (referred to here as KB1, NB1, TK1 and MD8, respectively), each the eldest member of his community, were chosen for genome sequencing based on their linguistic group, geographical location and Y chromosome haplogroup representation (Fig. 1 and Supplementary Table 1). The Bantu individual is Archbishop Desmond Tutu (ABT), who represents Sotho-Tswana and Nguni speakers (from the broad Niger–Congo languages), the two largest southern African Bantu groups.
The importance of this paper, IMHO, is that these are the genomes of five identifiable Africans. Their photos appear in the manuscript. If only everyone who’d been sequenced actually knew about it…
I work as an Assistant Professor in the Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy (although this site and its content are my own).
In 2007 I became the fourth subject in Harvard geneticist George Church's Personal Genome Project. As the PGP moves forward, I am chronicling the dawn of personal genomics, that is, people obtaining their genomic information for whatever reason(s) and figuring out what to do with it. I am interested in the relevant technologies and especially the attendant privacy and other ethical/legal/social issues.
This blog may also discuss some of my non-genome interests or, to paraphrase Dwight Yoakam, "Guitars, Cadillacs, hillbilly music, etc etc."
The header image comes from the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange's multimedia performance piece, "Ferocious Beauty: Genome."