Abstract
The practice of Ayurveda, the traditional medicine of India, is based on the concept of three major constitutional types (Vata, Pitta and Kapha) defined as “Prakriti”. To the best of our knowledge, no study has convincingly correlated genomic variations with the classification of Prakriti. In the present study, we performed genome-wide SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) analysis (Affymetrix, 6.0) of 262 well-classified male individuals (after screening 3416 subjects) belonging to three Prakritis. We found 52 SNPs (p ≤ 1 × 10−5) were significantly different between Prakritis, without any confounding effect of stratification, after 106 permutations. Principal component analysis (PCA) of these SNPs classified 262 individuals into their respective groups (Vata, Pitta and Kapha) irrespective of their ancestry, which represent its power in categorization. We further validated our finding with 297 Indian population samples with known ancestry. Subsequently, we found that PGM1 correlates with phenotype of Pitta as described in the ancient text of Caraka Samhita, suggesting that the phenotypic classification of India’s traditional medicine has a genetic basis; and its Prakriti-based practice in vogue for many centuries resonates with personalized medicine.
Highlights
The practice of Ayurveda, the traditional medicine of India, is based on the concept of three major constitutional types (Vata, Pitta and Kapha) defined as “Prakriti”
A total of 3,416 normal healthy male subjects between 20–30 years of age were recruited by the Institute of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine (IAIM), Bangalore, Karnataka (‘B’ in tables); Sinhgad College of Engineering (SCE) Pune, Maharashtra (‘P’ in tables); and Shri Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara College of Ayurveda (SDMCA), Udupi, Karnataka (‘U’ in tables)
The composition of Prakriti was determined by senior Ayurvedic physicians and confirmed independently by ‘AyuSoft’, a software developed based on information from classical Ayurvedic literature
Summary
To increase the statistical power, we used Indian population data set as reference and imputation analysis was performed using Beagle (v3.3.1) software[18] (Figure S1). In order to check the ancestry of Prakriti individuals, we used our published data set of 297 Indian population samples with known ancestry[19,20] These 297 samples include; 150 Dravidians, 80 Indo-European, 35 Austro-Asiatic, 27 Tibeto-Burman and 5 Great Andamanese In order to remove the differentiation on spurious axes[21], we pruned 3,76,138 SNPs, which were in strong linkage disequilibrium (LD) (r2 > 0.75), and performed PCA with 4,13,171 SNPs. Our analysis showed that most of the Prakriti samples clustered with Dravidian and Indo-European (the two major ancestral population of India), and only 3 samples seemed to be Tibeto-Burman and admixed recently (Figure S4). – – PDE6C RIMS2 – – – FIGN CGNL1 RIMS2 SEMA3C NFYC – PDE6C C4orf[19] TBX3 SEMA3C RIMS2 RIMS2 – VPS8 PDE6C – FIGN – LOC643201 – NFYC, MIR30C1 RIMS3 LINC00351 – VPS8 –
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