Dubai Police participate in the analysis and publication of the Human Genome Diversity Project

An officer from Dubai Police has joined the international efforts to understand human genetic diversity and published the most comprehensive atlas of genetic variation to date by analyzing a globally diverse set of populations as part of the renowned Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP).

Major Mohammad Ali Al Merri, who is currently a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, and his fellow researchers, in cooperation with Cambridge and Harvard Universities, have published two papers on the Human Genome Diversity Project which are featured in two high-impact scholarly journals: Science and Cell.

Maj. Al Merri is also heading a new project to study Arab Genome Diversity as part of his PhD. They identified a large number of variants that are specific to the region and highlight the missing diversity of Arab samples in genome projects. This new project will complement the HGDP, which lacks samples from the Arabian Peninsula, ensuring that the region is not excluded in the field of personalized medicine which has the potential to exacerbate healthcare disparities.

Maj. Al Merri, who completed his studies under the Dubai Police scholarship program, expressed his appreciation and gratitude to the force for giving him and his colleagues a chance to become students of the most prestigious universities in the world.