{"doi":"10.1371/journal.pone.0265625","title":"Genetic differentiation in East African ethnicities and its relationship with endurance running success","abstract":"Since the 1960s, East African athletes, mainly from Kenya and Ethiopia, have dominated long-distance running events in both the male and female categories. Further demographic studies have shown that two ethnic groups are overrepresented among elite endurance runners in each of these countries: the Kalenjin, from Kenya, and the Oromo, from Ethiopia, raising the possibility that this dominance results from genetic or/and cultural factors. However, looking at the life history of these athletes or at loci previously associated with endurance athletic performance, no compelling explanation has emerged. Here, we used a population approach to identify peaks of genetic differentiation for these two ethnicities and compared the list of genes close to these regions with a list, manually curated by us, of genes that have been associated with traits possibly relevant to endurance running in GWAS studies, and found a significant enrichment in both populations (Kalenjin, P = 0.048, and Oromo, P = 1.6x10-5). Those traits are mainly related to anthropometry, circulatory and respiratory systems, energy metabolism, and calcium homeostasis. Our results reinforce the notion that endurance running is a systemic activity with a complex genetic architecture, and indicate new candidate genes for future studies. Finally, we argue that a deterministic relationship between genetics and sports must be avoided, as it is both scientifically incorrect and prone to reinforcing population (racial) stereotyping.","journal":"PLoS ONE","year":2022,"id":275256,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":9,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9471,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":304234,"name":"Mateus H. Gouveia","orcid":"0000-0001-6711-5265","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":304239,"name":"Marla Mendes de Aquino","orcid":"0000-0002-6114-7482","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":944379,"name":"Rodrigo Quevedo","orcid":"0000-0002-4677-2490","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":944380,"name":"Rodrigo Leal-Menezes","orcid":"0000-0002-9859-9976","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":35213,"name":"Charles N. Rotimi","orcid":"0000-0001-5759-053X","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":944381,"name":"Gerald O. Lwande","orcid":"0000-0003-0801-3028","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":472744,"name":"Collins Ouma","orcid":"0000-0001-8205-8887","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":944382,"name":"Ephrem Mekonnen","orcid":"0000-0003-0416-649X","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":944383,"name":"Nelson J. R. Fagundes","orcid":"0000-0003-0456-0323","position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":944378,"name":"André L. S. Zani","orcid":"0000-0002-7220-1077","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":103,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:28:16.928746Z","pmid":"35588128","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}