Genomic backgrounds differ between different ethnicities. So far, majority of the large genetic researches were performed using European populations.
The BioBank Japan project is one of the largest biobanks in the world that is composed of non-Europeans. We will compare the genetic analysis results of UK Biobank and those of BioBank Japan (n~200,000) to search for mutual benefits for genomic medicine in both ethnicities and also in humans.
By using the knowledge about similarities and differences of certain genetic factors between UK Biobank and the BioBank Japan, the future genomic medicine would extend its scope from Europeans to multi-ethinic populations including East Asians. Our efforts of the analyses will also contribute to the health care of other ethnicities such as Africans, Central Asians, South Asians, Oceanians and so on, and will improve people’s health in the world.
The BioBank Japan project started in 2003 and has recruited approximately 200,000 hospital-based Japanese participants. Clinical data were retrieved from medical records. DNA samples were also collected and genotyped by genome-wide SNP genotyping arrays.
We will compute the effects of genetic factors on diseases and other phenotypes between UK Biobank and the BioBank Japan, and perform phenome-wide similarity/dissimilarity search between two populations. We will also perform state-of-art analyses or develop some novel genetic methods which take population-specific linkage disequilibrium structure and population-specific gene expression patterns into consideration and compare their utility between multi-ethnic data.
We request the full cohort. We are aiming at investigating any possible phenotypes that are comparable between UK Biobank and BioBank Japan to maximize the possibility for the multi-ethnic comparison. Primarily we are interested in genetic architecture of health outcomes (mortality and disease susceptibility).