Memoir of a decade in African genomics research
- Wits University
A book commemorating 10 years of the AWI-Gen project shares stories of those who researched how genetics, environment, and lifestyle affect health in Africa.
AWI-Gen is the Africa Wits-INDEPTH Partnership for Genomic Studies.
The Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience (SBIMB) at Wits published the book, titled Celebrating AWI-Gen: A Memoir. Professor Michèle Ramsay, Director of the SBIMB, presented a copy of the book to Wits Vice-Chancellor and Principal, Professor Zeblon Vilakazi, at an informal ceremony at Wits University on 26 July.
Celebrating AWI-Gen: A Memoir celebrates 10 years of the AWI-Gen project, which works to understand how genes, environment, and lifestyle affect cardiovascular and metabolic health across Africa, and to uncover new insights that could help to improve the health of Africans.
Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research & Innovation, Professor Lynn Morris, says: “To tell the story of a project – we hardly ever do that – how the ideas came together, and the successes, and the stories behind the papers…”
“Almost every person in Africa is admixed”
The front cover image on the memoir is inspired by one paper. The scientific research that inspired this design was published in the journal Nature in 2020, and the Marigold beadwork response to that data was featured on the journal’s cover.
This design is a translation of genetic admixture data plots. The hand-loomed beadwork is a tactile reminder of the people abstractly represented by the data.
Using the actual beaded necklace featured on the cover of Nature and the memoir, Ramsay explains at the handover:
“Every row is a person, and every colour represents an element of their ancestry. So in this particular segment here, we hypothesized three different ancestries – so three different shades of green. So you can see some people are just one colour, but some are already showing admixture, which means that they have ancestral elements from three different origins."
Ramsay continues: "Then we took exactly the same data set and we said, ‘let’s model it now for six different ancestries’ and then here, you’ve got six different colours representing different origins. So you’ve got the same three shades of green, and now you’ve got gold and blue and red. And now you see the same people actually have more complex admixture patterns from more ancestries, so the modelling shows its complexities. And what we’ve show is that almost every person in Africa is admixed, because they have different ancestral elements.”
Morris says, “This is the art of science but it’s also the science of art – this [necklace] created so much excitement because this is actually a genetic sequence and to make science have an impact beyond what we are used to and what we do.
I think what’s remarkable about [the memoir] it is that you took the time to do it. You have papers to write, you have got students to graduate, but you took the time to do this, because this, really, will have a huge impact for people beyond the scientific community, and also it’s a model for how people can take this forward."
Capacity strengthening through AWI-Gen – the next generation of research investigators
Continuing this research and graduating the next generation of genetics researchers is an important element of the AWI-Gen project. There’s a chapter in the book that focuses on the first five years of AWI-Gen, which “had an important emphasis on capacity strengthening”, interpreted at several levels including research infrastructure to build laboratory capacity to process blood, urine and stool samples; fieldwork experience for a large genomic research endeavours; but most importantly to build the next generation of research investigators.
Some of the Wits doctoral graduates whose PhDs were awarded through the AWI-Gen project include Dr Godfred Agongo (Ghana), 2019; Palwendé Romuald Bousa (Burkina Faso), 2019; and Dr Cassandra Soo (South Africa), 2021, amongst many others – including current doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers.
Boua says in the book: “I have leveraged the wealth of the AWI-Gen network to build collaborations in Africa and all over the world, which are fostering my career as a human geneticist.”
Networks and community have been fundamental to the success of AWI-Gen. Vilakazi, formerly a member of the Board, writes in the memoir’s foreword:
“One of the most impressive contributions of the AWI-Gen partnership has been the emphasis on community engagement with a variety of stakeholders, and especially the interaction with the research participants and their communities more broadly. It is already making a difference to communities on the ground through policy interventions and recommendations to communities who have been part of these studies over the last ten years. Ethical considerations receive the highest priority from these teams, which are to be lauded.”
Precision medicine is the future in Africa
The AWI-Gen project is poised to continue for at least the next four years. According to the memoir, “AWI-Gen has joined several international consortia where it contributes rare and precious data from continental Africa.”
These include working with Variant Bio, Multimorbidity in Africa Digital Innovation, Visualisation and Application Research Hub (MADIVA), the Global Lipid Genomics Consortium, several working groups of the Cohort for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology (CHARGE), as well as being a member of the Polygenic Risk Methods in Diverse Populations (PRIMED) consortium, amongst many other partnerships.
Other future research interests for AWI-Gen – and the SBIMB – include exploring unexplained female infertility, as well as mental health and depression, in Africa.