Sidra Medicine builds the Middle East's first population-scale atlas of how DNA variants regulate genes

4 November 2026

Researchers at Sidra Medicine in Doha, a member of Qatar Foundation, have built the Middle East's first population-scale atlas of how genetic variation controls gene activity in blood.
The study is published in Nature Genetics as 'A catalogue of transcriptome genetic regulation in a consanguineous Middle Eastern biobank'.
The team drew on nearly 2,000 Qatar Biobank participants, pairing their whole-genome sequences with blood transcriptomics and clinical records.
The team found nearly 30,000 'causal' effects on gene regulation and linked them to 20 clinical traits and disease pathways.
It also looked at consanguinity, which raises the chance of inheriting two copies of the same variant, and showed this can affect gene activity too.
The work was led by Prof. Younes Mokrab and is meant to help precision medicine for Arab populations.