Study the genes to follow migrations of populations

2008/04/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Eboluzioa
• Genetika

The human being was born in Africa, from where he spread all over the world, according to the theory of Out of Africa, today considered true. How did that dispersion occur? That is, where has every human being of the world come to where he is now? The two research papers published in the journals Nature and Science have consisted of the gene analysis of people from 50 geographical groups around the world - those published in Science have analyzed the genome of 938 people and the Nature group with 485 people - and have proposed a migration model for each of them.

To identify differences between individuals, nucleotic differences were sought in certain fragments of DNA, called mononuclear polymorphisms. More than five hundred thousand nucleotides of this type were analyzed in each individual and subsequently all genomes were compared. It was observed that from this comparison, geographical displacement of individuals and/or populations can be followed.