India needs to develop an appreciation of the ethnic diversity: Stephan C. Schuster

The diversity of the Indian population adds value to the understanding of the genetic makeup of the country as a whole.
India needs to develop an appreciation of the ethnic diversity: Stephan C. SchusterIndia needs to develop an appreciation of the ethnic diversity: Stephan C. Schuster - Image
Stephan C. Schuster, Prof., Research Director, Singapore Center for Environmental Life Science Engineering, talks to ETHealthworld about the developments in the field of genomics and his views on Indian population.

1. How has the field of genomics evolved?

The field of genomics is now in its second decade and major milestones have been reached such as the completion of the human genome. We are only beginning to understand that how much more it is ahead of us in dealing with the flood of data that is now being generated by the new technologies that are made available to us.

2. How do you find the Indian population?

The Indian population has come from a very small size. This enormous growth of 1.3 billion people in a very short period of time has resulted in a lot of variation within the population. This is also a reason that we now have to recognize and analyze to understand.

3. What are the areas where India still needs to develop?

India needs to develop on appreciation of the ethnic diversity of the people that live in India. They also need to understand how all these different groups bring value to understand the genetic makeup of the Indian population as a whole. Once that has been done people on the outside should be allowed to make contributions to the analysis of this data. It will take a very long time if India only tries to solve its problems within Indian population as some of the solutions are already available in the other countries.

The Indian population is as different from the African population as our Europeans. The Indian population is most similar to the European population. Some of the treatments have already been generated by the genetic work on Europeans that are also applicable to Indian population. I feel India should create a large number of their own reference genomes and once these genome's are available, population sequencing project in India will help to show which of the variants are normal part of the population and which of the genetic markers are actually indicative of a genetic disease. The logistics and the handling of very large number of samples is still done faster in big established genome centres that already have been operational for more than 25 years.

4. What are the challenges that you face?

The two big challenges are to create and manage cohorts. First is to have access to literally hundred and thousands of blood samples and tissue samples. The second challenge is giving more importance to analysis of data rather than generation of the data.

5. What are your key interests in genomics?

My key interest in genomics is to understand diversity and we have been doing this by working with indigenous tribes in Africa and we now are also doing this in other parts of Asia like in Indonesia and at the same time I am also interested to carry over all those insights that we learn by working on human population and population of endangered animals.

appiIMAIDAHealthcare Federation of IndiaAIMENeoCon2015