After watching Dr Adam Rutherford’s BBC program The Gene Code, I can see the future workflow of Indian matrimonial agencies.
Just give you a bit of background Adam talks about an Indian study that shows certain genes behave differently in specific Indian caste people. This is because most of the Indian people marry within their caste, the chances of carrying their distinct qualities to the offspring is high.
The future workflow of Indian matrimonial agencies:
- Get grooms blood sample along with other metadata
- Get the genome sequencing done. By this time there will be ‘n’ number of gully sequencing centers providing the sequencing service for Rs1000.
- In-house bioinformatician does the similarity search against bride’s ‘caste based reference genome’
- If Brides ‘caste specific genes’ exist:
- If there is a strong evidence: go ahead with marriage, but check for susceptibility to future disease.
- Else: No Marriage. There will be no further pipeline to deal with distant relationships.
A new group of brokers emerge to assist grooms to get thier genomic data modified for a price. Well, dont know how Anna Hazare will respond.
[Image source: http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2008/02/theme-genomes-junk-dna.html]
This could also be used as an alternative method to find out same caste people, if Indian government abandons the caste system. Instead of ‘what caste you are’, People may ask ‘what are your family genes’? Of course it only works until Inter-caste marriages are not much popular in the population.
Also, imagine what would happen to those Indian cinema’s famous caste/vamsam based dialogues? hilarious.. The hero might say “Pata hain, hum kis gene kaandhan se hain?“