Oh, what a shocker! It turns out the Turkish genome isn’t the star of the show in those massive genomic databases. Who would’ve thought, right? So, in a groundbreaking move, some intrepid researchers decided to see how this underrepresentation might affect the clinical utility of genetic findings in Turkish women with breast cancer. They rolled up their sleeves and dug into the genetic treasure trove of 132 women with breast cancer and a whopping 492 individuals without cancer from the Umraniye Research and Training Hospital’s finest.

Armed with 27 cancer genes, they set out to compare the genetic goodies (variants) between the two groups. And guess what? They found 121 variants in the breast cancer cohort and 223 variants in the non-cancer cohort. But here’s the kicker: 21 variants were crashing both parties, suggesting a genetic population effect (or maybe these variants just have FOMO).

When they peeked at the allele frequencies in the Turkish Variome and gnomAD, they discovered that 22% of the variants were partying way harder in the Turkish Variome, with a mean difference of 60 times. That’s like comparing a house party to a full-blown festival. And after they adjusted for variant allele frequency using the ancestry-appropriate database, they managed to reclassify a whopping 6.7% of VUS to likely benign. It’s like finding out that the suspicious-looking guy at the party was actually just the pizza delivery dude.

So, in a nutshell, this is apparently the first time someone’s taken a good hard look at population genetic effects in Turkish women with different breast cancer subtypes. And what did they find? That we need a bigger, better Turkish genomic database, and that using the right ancestry database is super important for not making a mess of variant assessments in clinical settings. Groundbreaking stuff, folks. Who knew genetics could be so inclusive?