The world's largest gene bank for ethnic minorities has been set up in Yunnan Province of southwest China. This will provide the firsthand materials for study on the diversification of inheritance and inherited diseases for the ethnic minorities.

It took scientific researchers of the Yunnan University three years to bring this gene bank to finish. It is possible to store 1,250 men's DNA from 25 ethnic groups in the province. These men who offered samples have no blood relationships, no history for marrying other ethnic peoples, and every man has the same ethnic origin for at least three generations in succession. What's more, they live in remote areas, and so the purity and separation degrees are quite higher. According to Professor Xiao Chunjie of Yunnan University, a pure gene bank of suchlike is hard to last for very long. All the samples are men because they offer both x and y chromosomes and the bank has selected 50 men from each ethnic group.

The gene bank of the Yunnan University is so far the largest of its kind in the world that has adopted the standard of the international human genome program.

(People's Daily 11/28/2000)