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closeThat is a very interesting article
Posted by aiolia25 on 10 Mar 2013 at 21:36 GMT
This article is very interesting and relevant. The tools you used seem to be coherent and simple. I really like your approach of studying the populations by religions and geography. I think this approach could be completed with data from Assyrian, and Coptic people for Christians as well as Syrian and Jordanian people for Muslim people. I reckon that the historical approach (Islamic expansion) is as well very interesting. For me this article is one of the best. However, that is a pity you did not have more data, especially the study of those population would be much more relevant with Syrian and Jordanian populations data. Moreover, it will very interesting to link the different invasions (crusaders, Mongols for Syria, Turks, greek, roman and persian). I am sure it is very expensive and very hard to get those data.
Many thanks for this article, I hope you will continue to publish high qualities article like this one.
RE: That is a very interesting article
Marc_Haber replied to aiolia25 on 11 Mar 2013 at 09:19 GMT
Thank you for your interest in this paper. I totally agree that it would have been perfect if we have included more populations like Assyrians, Copts, and Christians from Syria and Palestine. We have tried in particular to include Assyrians and Lebanese Jews, however we hit obstacles that significantly delayed our work. One of their major concern was that if genetic differences with other groups exist, this could lead to more discrimination toward their religious groups. We have tried to explain that there is no “positive” or ”negative” result and that the outcome of the study will be valuable to all groups, first from an anthropological/historical perspective and second through giving an insight for better designing genetic association studies in the region. We later proceeded with the work using the 3 Lebanese groups that contributed to the study in addition to published data and found that our major aims can still be attained.
Concerning linking the results to historical events, the first drafts of the paper tried to explore some of these, however we have tried later to focus the work more on the major aims and reduce as much as we can speculations concerning explicit events. For example, in previous drafts we have highlighted the clustering in Figure S5 of 6 Spanish samples, all from Andalusia, with the Levantines. This paragraph was later removed upon a reviewer’s suggestion. Nevertheless, we have made our data publicly available and we hope that interested people will explore it further and post their thoughts and results in blogs and forums.