Historic Genomics: An Emergent Discipline

Dear Colleagues,

The present issue contains papers that show how the diversity of different genetic markers across the world populations may be useful to obtain inferences about their historical–prehistorical interactions. History has been a speculative topic and many of its basic supports are only premises that have not been confronted with objectivity because of a lack of appropriate data. The widespread use of gene amplification and other more advanced technologies developed by genomics allow us to easily study full genomes, diseased genes, and gene diversity within populations. This variability is useful to confront the historic premises or “dogma” with objective genetic data. Gene variability is not yet studied in humans on a large scale and the following decades will be needed to study both the nondiseased-linked and the diseased-linked genes.

Epidemiological genomics will be a fully developed science when a map of the genes linked to diseases will be on its way of being constructed. This will be the basis of a predictive medicine that will have a remarkable social and economic importance in the present century. Therefore, historic genomics is slowly being developed by comparing genetic variability between populations with the available historical postulates.

The HLA community has been unable to show anthropologists how useful the polymorphic human genetic system could be to study population genetics and historic genomics. A few HLA alleles, mtDNA, and Y-chromosome variants are all linked to diseases that may have been common in the past or in certain populations and are also useful for the historic genomics study.

Furthermore, polymorphic genes are currently in use in population genetics: full genome studies, SNPs, and STRs. However, low polymorphic gene markers may be useless for distinguishing populations since “noise“ is too high, and thus, the distinguishability of population is reduced. Even now, a geographic discrimination is a good sign of a good marker. Both HLA and Y-chromosome markers are good examples of markers with clear geographic gradients.

Prof. Dr. Antonio Arnaiz-Villena
Guest Editor

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• history
• genomics
• mtDNA
• Y chromosome
• HLA
• SNPs
• STRs
• genetic markers
• full genome