Our work, and that of others, advocates for larger genetic studies in understudied populations6 and the use of orthogonal LD-independent functional data to improve the disease predictive power of genetic models in such populations, as increasing GWAS power cannot mitigate the bias introduced by LD. Our study should not in any way be interpreted as a justification for reducing the emphasis on the need for diversity in human genetic studies. Currently, the study of trans-ancestry portability is a natural consequence of limited diversity. In a future with ancestrally diverse and high-powered genetic studies, the study of portability will serve to investigate population-specific genetic and environmental effects rather than reveal inequities.
