"An example of how valuable disease studies in non-standard populations can be"
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Abstract: Until recently, the standard in disease genetics has been to focus on large European and Asian populations. In this talk I will argue based on population genetic analyses that it can be extremely valuable to study other populations as well, especially historically small and isolated populations, like the Greenlandic population. To illustrate how valuable, I will present several genetic variants that we have identified in the Greenlandic population over the past few years. These variants all have large population level impact on health-related complex traits, like diabetes, BMI and lipid levels. For instance, the first variant we identified is a loss-of-function variant, which explains more than 10% of all type 2 diabetes cases in Greenland. I will also discuss how the identification of these variants can potentially lead to personalized medicine in Greenland. Finally, to the
extent that time allows, I will say a bit about the methodological challenges we have encountered during these studies.
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Bio: Ida Moltke is an associate professor at the Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen. She has an MSc in Bioinformatics and PhD in population genetics and statistical genetics both from the University of Copenhagen. After finishing her PhD, she did a postdoc at University of Chicago and then moved back to Copenhagen to start her own research group in 2015. Her research consists of developing and applying computational methods to analyse genetic data with the goal of answering questions about human evolution, history and disease. Among many other things, she has worked on numerous genetic studies of the Greenlandic population to understand their population history, how they have adapted to the cold environment and what genetic variants cause them to get diseases, like diabetes.
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