CLAS Lecture Series: Genetic Diversity in Latin America and the Pacific: Lessons from Understudied Human Populations

Genetic data is transforming our understanding of the natural world and the diversity of our own species. Latin America is among the regions that concentrate most of the biodiversity of the planet, including ethnic, linguistic and cultural diversity of Latin American human populations. However, despite the globalization of biotechnologies to analyze the human genome, indigenous populations from the Americas remain underrepresented in large-scale genomic studies.

In this talk, Professor Moreno Estrada will discuss recent efforts to characterize the genetic profile of Native Americans throughout the continent and focus on regional approaches aimed at resolving finer scale population structure patterns in Mexico, the Caribbean, South America, and the Pacific.

This topic poses challenges and opportunities to adequately study human diversity not only for the benefit of researchers and science, but also for the benefit of the local communities, which are bearers of a unique evolutionary history that has been recorded in their DNA. This rapidly evolving field also raises questions about the best practices when applying genomic approaches to promote a sustainable use of Latin American biodiversity in a modern and globalized world. How to avoid genetic colonialism?

Andrés Moreno Estrada is a Mexican population geneticist interested in human genetic diversity and its implications in population history and medical genomics. He is a medical doctor by training (University of Guadalajara, 2002) and pursued a PhD in Evolutionary Genetics in Barcelona (Pompeu Fabra University, 2009), where he was trained in human population genetics working on the analysis of genetic variation in candidate genes under positive selection on the human lineage. Dr. Moreno was a postdoctoral fellow from 2009 to 2012 in Prof. Carlos Bustamante’s group at Cornell University and Stanford University School of Medicine. He later became Research Associate of the Genetics Department at Stanford University until 2014. For his work in Latin America he was awarded the “George Rosenkranz Prize for Health Care Research in Developing Countries” in 2012. His work integrated genomics, evolution and precision medicine in different projects involving large collections of populations, in particular from the Americas and the Pacific. He authored the most detailed work so far of the genetic structure of the Mexican population, including the first genomic characterization of 20 diverse indigenous groups throughout Mexico (Science 2014), as well as fine-scale studies in the Caribbean region (PLOS Genetics 2013) and South America (PLOS Genetics 2015). Since 2015, Prof. Moreno is the Principal Investigator of the Human Evolutionary and Population Genomics Laboratory and Head of the Genome Core Facility at the National Laboratory of Genomics for Biodiversity (LANGEBIO), in Irapuato, Mexico. His group is interested in human evolution, adaptation, and population history as well as the biomedical implications of human genetic diversity in underserved populations of the world, particularly from Latin America.

Professor Estrada is currently a Tinker Visiting Professor at the Center for Latin American Studies. He is teaching BIO 331: The Genetic Footprint of Latin America and its Impact in a Multicultural Society in Spring 2017.