Identifying positively selected genetic variants in the Chinese, Malay and Indian populations in Southeast Asia

This thesis is under the specialisation 'Genobioinf'. Evolutionary diversification has enabled humans to adapt to climatic and dietary changes and respond to pathogens. My research focuses on Southeast Asian populations, which have been underrepresented in genomic studies. I employed a statistical method called the Fine-Mapping of Adaptation Variation (FineMAV), that pinpoints parts of the human genome that have undergone changes in response to their environment and resulted in evolutionary adaptation. I developed a software that other researchers can use to generate genome-wide FineMAV scores for human genomic sequencing datasets of their interest and help identify variants that can be subsequently studied using cellular assays or animal models.