Study finds genomic resemblance between Nigeria’s Berom tribe and East, Central African peoples

A study based on sequencing genomes from regions and countries across Africa has found resemblance between the genomes of the Berom people of Plateau State, Nigeria and people of Central and Eastern Africa.

A genome is an organism’s complete set of genetic instruction.

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The study, which was published in the journal Nature, is a large-scale effort by researchers in the Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) Consortium, and jointly funded by the National Institutes of Health Office of the Director and the Wellcome Trust.

The study is also a major milestone in African genomics research capacity, as it was led predominantly by local researchers using local resources. Before now, there has been a dearth of genetic data for African populations.

Dr Clement Adebamowo, Principal Investigator of the African Collaborative Center for Microbiome and Genomics Research (ACCME), one of the H3Africa projects, and Research Scientist at Institute of Human Virology Nigeria, said the data gives us a more complete picture of the genetic history of Africa.

He added that “the genomic evidence that the Berom are distinct from neighbouring tribes in central Nigeria accords with socio-cultural observations of the ethnic group.”

The researchers conducted whole-genome sequencing of 426 individuals from 13 African countries, whose ancestries represented 50 ethnolinguistic groups from across the continent.

Of the 426 genomes sequenced, 314 were analyzed at high depth. This allowed the researchers to examine rare genetic variants in an accurate and quantifiable way, in addition to the common variants that have been the focus of most of the previous genetic studies in Africans.

In an interview with Daily Trust, Dr Adebamowo, who is also a Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health, and an Associate Director of Population Science at the Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of Maryland Baltimore said some genomic research which commenced in the late 90’s also formed the foundation for the current study of the H3Africa projects.

“We studied the genomes of people from the Yoruba ethnic group, people from Asia, East, Central, South African populations, and that of the Berom. By looking at the genomes of the Berom people and that of the other groups around them, we could see that the genome of the Berom most closely resembles the genome of people in Central and Eastern Africa,” he told Daily Trust.”

Dr Adebamowo said the research also revealed that the ancestors of the population that expanded to become Berom came from that part of Africa. “And by looking at what we call specific markers in the genome, we can determine the age of that migration and we can say they came 50 to 70 generations ago which is equivalent to 1500 to 2000 years.

“So sometime in that period, the ancestors of the Berom people migrated from eastern and central African to the place that is now called Nigeria.”

The ACCME principal investigator also said one of the challenges in finding out how genes cause diseases in Africa is that very little is known about the different variations in genomes.

He added that one of the breakthroughs in the new study is that the researchers were able to identify 3.4 million new variations that the world did not know about African tribes.

“By knowing this, we can now test how they cause diseases. Before the new findings, if we rely on data from Europe and the United States we would be reaching wrong conclusions about which genes are associated with what diseases. But now that we know, that in these populations there were other variations that were not known previously, we would move forward and begin to test those variations to see what they influence. This is very important, foundational work.”

He said with the findings from the new study, experts would now be able to tell which genes in the Berom are important and are associated with diabetes, cancers, blindness, infertility and other diseases.