Marina Muzzio, Ph.D.

Research

The application of admixture mapping to the identification of complex traits in populations tracing their ancestry to genetically differentiated populations has become of growing interest, and it is thought that this approach will be powerful for identifying genes in Latin American populations. Although it is known that Latin American populations resulted from the admixture of Native Americans, Europeans and Africans, few details are known about this process and its genetic correlates, so it is of biomedical interest to fulfill a genomic survey of admixture in these populations, in order to determine the diverse genetic landscape of Latin America. One of the most important applications of such descriptive analysis is to reduce bias on genetic disease association studies, since underlying genetic structures are known to lead to a high amount of false positive results due to differences in the genetic composition of cases and controls. We are describing the population structure in Argentina by employing an exhaustive set of 500,000 genome wide markers (with the use of Affymetrix GeneChip 500K Array Set) in 1,500 samples from 17 different locations within Argentina. These locations belong to diverse geographical areas, which involved varied population histories, so it is expected to find differences in their genetic composition. This exhaustive study of the Argentinean population structure will promote biomedical findings in other Latin American countries and countries such as the United States, where Latino populations are a considerable percentage of the population.