Executive Summary

By Patrick Turley, Elizabeth Atkinson, and Alicia Martin, with thanks for helpful comments and feedback to Shawneequa Callier, Shades@Broad, Lydje Lahens, Aghogho Okparavero, and others. Any errors and claims within these FAQs are solely our own.

The goal of this project is to provide a resource to researchers that promotes more inclusive research practices, accelerates scientific discoveries, and improves the health of all people equitably. In genetics research, it is statistically necessary to study groups of individuals together with similar ancestries. In practice, this has meant that most previous research has excluded individuals with non-European ancestries. Here, we describe an effort to build a resource using one of the most widely accessed sources of genetic data, the UK Biobank, in a manner that is more inclusive than most previous efforts -- namely studying groups of individuals with diverse ancestries. The results of this research have a number of important limitations which should be carefully considered when researchers use this resource in their work and when they and others interpret subsequent findings.