Singapore, Nov. 5 -- Researchers at Sidra Medicine, a member of Qatar Foundation, have created the Middle East's first population-scale atlas showing how genetic variation regulates gene activity in blood and tracing its effects to clinical traits.

Published in Nature Genetics, the study, titled "A catalogue of transcriptome genetic regulation in a consanguineous Middle Eastern biobank", provides a new resource to advance precision medicine and addresses a major gap in global genomics and advances precision medicine by enabling more precise genetic diagnosis and disease-risk prediction, while supporting the discovery of new biomarkers and therapeutic targets.

Despite major genome sequencing efforts worldwide, little is known about what ...