Role of Ancestry Genes in Asthma Susceptibility

Abstract

Adverse racial differences exist throughout respiratory diseases, including asthma where African descent minority groups such as African Americans and Puerto Ricans experience greater asthma risk and morbidity compared to European descent Whites. Advances in genomic technologies have advanced the complexity and quantity of genetic data to analyze and interpret in individuals from different racial groups with varying inter‐individual ancestral backgrounds. The vast majority of genomic studies have been performed in European descent Whites, but there has been increasingly diverse studies consisting of different racial and ethnic groups where differences have been demonstrated in asthma risk, severity, and drug response. A “bottleneck” resulted in a collapse of genetic diversity following the first human colonization of Europe during the Upper Paleolithic period and the more recent mixing of African, European, and Native American ancestries. These recent admixture events have resulted in different ethnic groups with varying degrees of genetic diversity, including variability in genetic tagging architectures and the frequency of genetic variants, particularly rare variants which are most frequently found to be unique to individual ancestries. Variability in genetic ancestral background could be associated with variation that has the potential to alter asthma risk, severity, or therapeutic responsiveness to commonly used therapies. Genomic studies have employed both traditional and admixture‐based whole‐genome approaches in minority, ethnically diverse cohorts resulting in the confirmation of genomic discoveries initially only found in Whites while identifying novel genetic determinants of asthma risk and drug response unique to specific ethnic groups. Large consortium‐based sequencing studies utilize next‐generation whole‐genome sequencing in diverse multi‐ethnic cohorts to provide a map of the genomes of different recently admixed populations to guide future genomic studies. Genomic studies in increasingly diverse cohorts provide an opportunity to facilitate discoveries and are a critical step towards precision medicine applicable to all people.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.