Barcelona, 17th January 2008
Dear Sir, Madame,
My name is Begoña Martinez Cruz. Me and my colleagues are contacting you in our capacity as Group Leaders for the Western and Central Europe division of the Genographic Project (www.genographic.com). The Objective of the Genographic project, launched jointly by The National Geographic Society and IBM, is to collect samples representative of human population diversity from all around the world in order to describe with accuracy the movement of humankind since their origin in addition to gathering more information on the expansion and colonisation of habitable continents. The ultimate aim in other words is to unravel our migration history as species. Within Genographic, the Western and Central European team has as its goal the collection of at least 10,000 samples from around Europe (100 male individuals per population selected) to ensure adequate coverage of the genetic diversity in our continent, with special attention given to particular populations such as the Aromums, Gottcheers or Roma.
With this aim in mind, we are interested in using genetics to answer questions related to the history of your population, the Gottscheers. At this point, and as you can read in the Genographic web page, genetic tools can help in disentangling the past demographic history of populations and ethnic groups. Our objective would be to collaborate in reconstructing that history, of course with the help of historical records or even oral tradition that would be very interesting for us. For such purpose, we would need your collaboration. In fact, what we would need is a small sample of DNA from non related males, pure Gottscheers (i.e. with Gottscheer ancestors). For this, in case you accept, we would send you a commercial kit with a swab with which you would need to scrub your mouth and keep it in the provided recipient, following the manufacturer indications. Of course, we would pay for all the fees for sending and getting the kits back to Barcelona. The results obtained from those samples would be published in specialized scientific publications, were you will be specifically acknowledged. In any case, the study would be anonymous, that is, each individual would be assigned a number and no name or personal information would be published or even kept. We would only keep each individual and its ancestors origins and sex of the individual associated with the number assigned.
If you are interested, we would be also very happy to go to give you a talk about our work about your population, and discuss on them with you, which would be undoubtedly very useful.
Of course, the sampling must be in conform with the ethical framework established in the Genographic project that includes a signed consent by every donor and the complete information about what would be done with the sample, that would never been used with a medical purpose. If you agree we would send you this ethical protocol for you to be completely informed.
We would be very grateful if you could transmit our interests and the information to any other member of the population.
We expect you would be happy to join our project and please feel free to ask us about any doubt you can have. We expect your answer to your earliest convenience. Please, send your answers to my mail addres and the one of my colleagues’, written below in the signature.
Sincerely,
The Western-Central European Genographic team
Dr. Jaume Bertranpetit e-mail: jaume.bertranpetit@upf.edu
Dr. David Comas e-mail: david.comas@upf.edu
Dr. Begoña Martinez-Cruz e-mail: begonya.martinez@upf.edu
Evolutionary Biology Unit
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Doctor Aiguader 88, 08003 Barcelona, Spain
