New tool facilitates inclusion of people of diverse ancestry in large genetics studies
More than one-third of the US population is made up of individuals with recent ancestors from multiple continents; a new genetics tool helps uncover disease-associated gene variants in more diverse individuals
BOSTON -- Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have typically excluded diverse and minority individuals in the search for gene variants that confer risk of disease. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and other institutions around the world have now developed a free-access software package called Tractor that increases the discovery power of genomics in understudied populations. A study of Tractor's performance and accuracy was published in END