Large-scale study of East Asian individuals reveals a number of previously overlooked genetic variants

Broad, population-based investigations known as genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are now a standard tool for helping scientists to pinpoint genetic variations that can contribute to disease risk or pathology. However, most of the studies performed to date have focused predominantly on populations of European ancestry, and therefore ignore or overlook risk markers that specifically predominate among other ethnic groups. A recent GWAS from a large team of scientists based in Korea and Japan, including Yukinori Okada of the RIKEN Center for Genomic Medicine in Yokohama, has addressed this inequity by specifically seeking out factors that might contribute to metabolic disease in East Asians (Fig. 1).

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