Live Science reports:

The racial and ethnic groups people identify with may not accurately represent their genetic backgrounds or ancestries, a new study of people in the United States suggests.

This discrepancy between people’s self-reported identities and their genetics is important for scientists to acknowledge as they strive to develop medical treatments tailored to different patients, the researchers behind the study say.

“This paper is very important because it clarifies at the highest resolution the relationship between genomic diversity and racial/ethnic categories in the US,” said study co-author Eduardo Tarazona-Santos, a professor of human population genetics at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil.

The findings are “critical to develop appropriate precision medicine solutions for all,” he told Live Science in an email. Precision medicine tailors treatments to individual patients, taking their genes, environment and lifestyle factors into account.

In their study, published Thursday (June 5) in The American Journal of Human Genetics, Tarazona-Santos and his colleagues analyzed the DNA of more than 230,000 people who contributed to the All of Us research database. This trove of data has been compiled through a National Institutes of Health program aimed at advancing precision medicine by recruiting people from diverse and underrepresented populations. [Continue reading…]