Ayurgenomics: A New Way of Threading Molecular Variability for Stratified Medicine

Modern humans evolved in Africa and spread across the world, successfully colonizing diverse geographical locations including extremes of latitudes, altitudes, arid and wet conditions as well as regions endemic for di" erent pathogens. Besides geo-climatic conditions, human genomes have also been shapedbyanaggregateofsocioculturalfactorssuchasadmixture, mating patterns, food sources, and dietary habits. These footprints ofhuman history inthe form ofgenetic variationsreside in our genomes, and many of them have become relatively ! xed in the past millions of years in certain populations. Nearly 11 millionsingle-nucleotidepolymorphisms(SNPs)havenowbeen catalogued in humans across diverse populations by the International HapMap Consortium. Coupled to this, the individual genome projects have also revealed a large fraction of variations that are speci! c to an individual. With this enormous amount of variability, it now seems that there are as many human genomes as there are humans. Thougha majorityof these variations might be neutral, a large number of these di" erences could contribute to adaptation, phenotypic variability, di" erences in disease susceptibility, and response to environment even within healthy individuals of a population. With global socioeconomic and cultural changes leading to altered lifestyles, diet patterns, and