Page 100 - THE MELANESIA DIASPORA FILE CETAK ISI 10022017

a number of Papuan languages, had been there for a very long time, tens of thousands
of years. The Ausraloid people would go on to inhabit the area in the east now known as
Melanesia and disappear from the rest of the region but at the time of the arrival of the
Austronesians they were widely dispersed across the entire archipelago including the
western part. Their descendants no longer occupy these areas, and have been replaced
by the Austronesians. So the question is, what happened during the long period before
the Austronesians arrived? Were there other migratory groups with different genetic
characteristics? What happened when Austronesian and Australoid populations were in
contact? Genetic research conducted by the Eijkman Institute for Molecular Biology since
1996 has helped to build a picture that can provide some answers to these questions about
Indonesian population genetics.

Genetic Mapping in Indonesia
Studies of genetic diversity in Indonesia were primarily developed because of the urgent
requirement to understand population structures in this area related to the management
of tropical diseases which were the focus of our initial research. The research activities
that began in 1996 also focused on the susceptibility and sensitivity of these populations
toward certain infectious diseases, in addition to lifestyle diseases such as diabetes mellitus
or metabolic syndromes. In order to understand the link between diseases and genetics,
we need data about the genome diversity of the Indonesian population. Susceptibility or
resistance to particular diseases varies from one ethnic group to another. But at that time,
no data was available on genomic diversity structures.
The absence of such data was very surprising, considering Indonesia is a nation with a
large population made up of a diverse range of ethno-linguistic groups located in an area
stretching across Asia and the Pacific. There were many factors underlying this, one of them
being difficulty of access related to the large number of languages in the archipelago, and
also because at the time nobody knew how to obtain this data. However, because of the
importance of the data, it was decided to start a long-term project to map the population
genetic structure of the Indonesian people. The decision to do this was made based on at least
two considerations. First of all, there little in the way of information about the population
structure of the Southeast Asian archipelago, and this was especially the case in Indonesia.
The studies that did exist focused on the Southeast Asia mainland and the Pacific. Secondly,
it was known that management of genetic diseases connected to endemic malaria such as
thalassemia and ovalocytosis were very diverse and ethnic-specific (Veenemans et al., 2011).

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