Enter the new chip, which will contain 2.5 million different markers hand-picked for their African relevance. It’s been produced by the Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) initiative, a program to boost genetic research in Africa funded by the UK and the US. The program has collected tens of thousands of samples from Africans to study genetic links for diseases like diabetes, sleeping sickness, rheumatic heart disease and tuberculosis. This information has fed the chip with data from dozens of African population groups, from the Khoi-San in the south to the Yoruba in the West and Masaai in the East.
Because African countries don’t yet have the machinery to sequence entire human genomes quickly, that part of the work was done at Baylor College of Medicine in the US. The resulting data—all 144 terabytes of it—took weeks, if not months, to transfer back to Africa via high-speed networks, where it was analyzed. The samples will be returned to Africa after sequencing to be stored in biological sample banks on the continent.
The video below nicely captures the diversity across Africa