Aswan Heart Centre - Egyptian Healthy Volunteers

A key objective of the existing Cardiomyopathies project is to develop and validate assays to identify the genetic and molecular determinants of inherited cardiomyopathies in the Egyptian population.

Current sequencing technology has made cost- and time-effective whole exome and whole genome sequencing feasible. In their attempt to make clinically-relevant conclusions, genetecists, clinicians and bioinformaticians are increasingly faced by thousands of polymorphisms and variants, the clinical significance of which requires careful and systematic analysis of a number of factors including location of the mutation within the genome, type of mutation, gene affected and the protein for which it codes, functional importance of the coded protein, segregation within the family as well as frequency of the detected variation in the same population.

The latter step requires defining what constitutes the "genetic norm" (including normal variants) within the reference population. Data for different populations is already available in a number of databases that are accessible to the scientific community to help maximize the public benefit from research. Examples include the Exome Aggregation Consortium (ExAC) - which aggregates exome sequencing data from 60,706 unrelated individuals - and the 1000 Genomes Project which aggregates whole genome sequencing data from 2500 individuals.

However, to be able to confirm novel gene variants in the Egyptian population, data has to be compared to genomes of healthy individuals in the same population.