Complete genome sequence and analysis of nine Egyptian females with clinical information from different geographic regions in Egypt

Abstract

Egyptians are at a crossroad between Africa and Eurasia, providing useful genomic resources for analyzing both genetic and environmental factors for future personalized medicine. Two personal Egyptian whole genomes have been published previously and here nine female whole genome sequences with clinical information have been added to expand the genomic resource of Egyptian personal genomes. Here we report the analysis of whole genomes of nine Egyptian females from different regions using Illumina short-read sequencers. At 30x sequencing coverage, we identified 12 SNPs that were shared in most of the subjects associated with obesity which are concordant with their clinical diagnosis. Also, we found mtDNA mutation A4282G is common in all the samples and this is associated with chronic progressive external ophthalmoplegia (CPEO). Haplogroup and Admixture analyses revealed that most Egyptian samples are close to the other north Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and European, respectively, possibly reflecting the into-Africa influx of human migration. In conclusion, we present wholegenome sequences of nine Egyptian females with personal clinical information that cover the diverse regions of Egypt. Although limited in sample size, the whole genomes data provides possible geno-phenotype candidate markers that are relevant to the region's diseases.

Genome-wide association study for systemic lupus erythematosus in an egyptian population

“…Previous studies indicated that Egyptians are highly admixed, with substantial ancestry arising from the Middle East, Europe, and Africa-with the extent of European and Caucasus hunter-gatherer (Lazaridis et al, 2016) contribution being higher, and the African contribution being lower, than might be expected from geography. Greater European/Middle Eastern than African ancestry is also supported by wholegenome sequencing (ElHefnawi et al, 2021). Importantly, modern Egyptians are quite divergent from ancient populations.…”