A deep multiomics survey of healthy adults across three ancestry groups and multiple continents has linked ethnicity and geography to distinct molecular, microbial, and aging-related signatures, offering a broad, open-access dataset for studying how genetic background and environment shape human biology.
The Stanford Medicine-led team analyzed samples from 322 healthy individuals of European, East Asian, and South Asian ancestry living in Asia, Europe, and North America. Their workflow combined a broad spectrum of analytical approaches, including genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic, lipidomic, glycomic, immune, and microbiome profiling. Sampling participants of the same ancestry across different regions also allowed them to separate ethnicity-linked signals from geography-linked ones more cleanly than is typical in population studies.
“For the first time we have deeply profiled people from around the world,” said Michael Snyder, co-senior author, in the team’s press release. “This enables us to see what properties such as metabolites and microbes are correlated with ethnicity and which ones with geography.”
Across the dataset, ethnicity showed strong associations with immune, metabolic, pathogen, and microbiome features. South Asian participants, for example, showed higher pathogen-reactive antibody signatures, while individuals of European ancestry had greater gut microbial diversity and elevated levels of several lipid and metabolite classes linked to cardiovascular and metabolic risk. Integrated analysis showed that the ethnicity-associated differences were not confined to one molecular layer, but extended across bile acid pathways, membrane lipid classes, immune networks, glycan processing, and drug-target proteins.
Geography also shaped molecular and microbial profiles. Participants living outside their ancestral regions showed shifts in cholesterol, bile acid, and arachidonic acid pathways, along with selective changes in gut microbiome composition. The researchers also observed geography-linked differences in biological age: East Asian participants showed lower biological age in East Asia, whereas participants of European ancestry showed lower biological age in the US and Canada than in Europe.
The authors say the resulting open-access resource could help refine precision medicine by giving researchers a clearer view of how molecular and microbial baselines differ across populations.
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