"Black Lives Matter and Black Research Matters": the African Society of Human Genetics' call to halt racism in science

Rethinking traditional recruitment methods for black men through relationship-based recruitment

Understanding health outcomes requires robust community relationships with potential research participants. Traditional recruitment methods have led to low engagement, particularly among Black men, negatively impacting their participation in clinical research. The aim of this research was to share how a relationship-based recruitment approach proved successful for recruiting this population. Black men often face fragmented care due to systemic biases. Despite efforts to improve recruitment, traditional methods prevail, offering minimal context such as travel vouchers resulting in poor response rates. To enhance recruitment, diverse strategies are essential. Engaging Black men in workplaces, sports clubs, community centers, and online platforms can better represent their varied experiences. A relationship-based approach was proven successful, as demonstrated by enrolling 60 Black men with low back pain in 60 days. We advocate for broader and more inclusive practices utilizing these recruitment strategies to improve health research participation in Black communities.

Expanding the human gut microbiome atlas of Africa

Population studies are crucial in understanding the complex interplay between the gut microbiome and geographical, lifestyle, genetic, and environmental factors. However, populations from low- and middle-income countries, which represent ~84% of the world population, have been excluded from large-scale gut microbiome research. Here, we present the AWI-Gen 2 Microbiome Project, a cross-sectional gut microbiome study sampling 1,803 women from Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa. By intensively engaging with communities that range from rural and horticultural to urban informal settlements and post-industrial, we capture population diversity that represents a far greater breadth of the world's population. Using shotgun metagenomic sequencing, we find that study site explains substantially more microbial variation than disease status. We identify taxa with strong geographic and lifestyle associations, including loss of Treponema and Cryptobacteroides species and gain of Bifidobacterium species in urban populations. We uncover a wealth of prokaryotic and viral novelty, including 1,005 new bacterial metagenome-assembled genomes, and identify phylogeography signatures in Treponema succinifaciens. Finally, we find a microbiome signature of HIV infection that is defined by several taxa not previously associated with HIV, including Dysosmobacter welbionis and Enterocloster sp. This study represents the largest population-representative survey of gut metagenomes of African individuals to date, and paired with extensive clinical biomarkers, demographic data, and lifestyle information, provides extensive opportunity for microbiome-related discovery and research.

The African Society of Human Genetics successfully launches global data science workshops

To accelerate the impact of African genomics on human health, data science skills and awareness of Africa's rich genetic diversity must be strengthened globally. We describe the first African genomics data science workshop, implemented by the African Society of Human Genetics (AfSHG) and international partners, providing a framework for future workshops.