Researchers have just released a study on the DNA of the Japanese population. This study defies the previous one, which was supposed to be precise on the identity of the people.
Japan, thaté you from identity
Japan is one of the countries with the lowest birth rate in the world, along with Hong Kong, South Korea and Italy. A low score that leads to a progressive aging of the population in the years to come. A worrying phenomenon against which the Japanese government has announced that it will take very strict measures.
Studies are also being conducted to understand the factors that lead to this aging. More recently, another study highlighted the inevitable destiny of the population, revealing that by 2500, all Japanese will have the same family name: Sato. A real scourge for identity.
The descendants of the Japanese put to the test
After a study on the future of the Japanese population, other researchers looked into the past, and the origins of the population. A genetic study conducted by scientists at the RIKEN Center for Medical Sciences revealed that the Japanese descend from three ancestral groups.The study challenges long-established assumptions that the Japanese descend from two main ancestral groups: indigenous Jomon hunter-gatherer-fishermen and rice-farming migrants from East Asia.
To support their research, the scientists used whole genome sequencing of more than 3,200 individuals in seven regions of Japan, spanning the length of the country, from Hokkaido in the north to Okinawa in the south. The study identified significant genetic variation and links to Northeast Asia, particularly the Emishi people.
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The term Emishi referred to the people of northeastern Japan. In the records, it is stated that the Emishi appear to be of the same race as the Japanese, and the term also appears to have been applied to various Japanese families. «Our analysis has revealed the structure of Japan's subpopulations at a very fine scale, which is very well classified according to the geographical locations of the country.»explains Chikashi Terao of RIKEN, who led the study.
One topic that particularly interested Terao was the study of rare genetic variants.“We reasoned that these rare variants could sometimes be traced back to specific ancestral populations and could be informative in revealing small-scale migration patterns within Japan,” he says.The researchers note in their study that Jomon ancestry is most dominant on the subtropical southern coasts of Okinawa (found in 28.5% of samples) while it is weakest in the west (only 13.4% of samples). In contrast, people in western Japan have more genetic affinities with Han Chinese, which Terao’s team suggests is likely related to: the influx of migrants from East Asia between 250 and 794, we read on the site scitechdaily.com, which reports the study.
This study does not only reveal the complex ancestry of the Japanese population. According to Terao, untangling the relationship between genes and how they impact traits could one day play a role in helping scientists develop personalized medicine.
“We tried “to find and catalog loss-of-function genetic variants that are highly specific to Japanese people, and to understand why they are more likely to have certain specific traits and diseases. We would like to link population differences to genetic differences,” Terao concludes.