Belgian and US researchers found out that the gene that protects people in Africa from sleeping sickness appears to develop kidney failure and diseases mostly to black Americans.
Based In researcher’s findings, it appears that the Black Americans are more prone to kidney failure than of white Americans.
This finding can lead to develop new methods and treatments to prevent the occurrences of this illness.
Around 30 percents of African Americans carries no less than one copy of the gene sequence that can lead to kidney disease.
According to researchers in their Science journal, a person who carries couple of copies of these genes is highly risk of kidney disease 10 times.
APOL1 was the gene involved in such illness.
Researchers from Harvard Medical School Dr. Martin Pollak and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and their colleagues in Belgium’s Universite Libre de Bruxelles use information from their 1,000 Genomes Projects that sequence the gene maps of individuals worldwide.
There are two variants of APOL1 that can increase the risk of kidney diseases; G1 and G2.
Based to Pollak and his team’s studies, these variants equally changed the coding scheme of APOL1, in their further studies they have found that these variants are genes that are present humans body immune system to protect the body against sleeping sickness.
Their finding shows that disease is most commonly appeared in black people,it is called sickle cell disease.
Having one copy of sickle cell gene can lead people to be likely infected by malaria. However, containing of two variants can develop to more serious symptoms.
Researcher’s study that the APOL1 protein made by the two variants of genes can killed the parasite that can cause African people’s sleeping sickness.
Researchers are happy enough about their new findings; it can help them for their better understanding and development of new ways and treatments for the kidney failure and sleeping sickness.
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