A Seoul National University (SNU) team has completed a genetic mapping project of people from Korea, Japan and China.

The team says they found distinct variations between the gene maps for Asians and those from other parts of the world, including the disappearance of particular genes and the repetition of mutations.

The team, led by Professor Seo Jeong-sun at the SNU Genomic Medicine Institute, says it completed high-resolution genomic maps of ten Koreans, ten Chinese and ten Japanese and found 35-hundred genes of new structural variations.

The team says the gene maps of Asians are markedly different from those of Europeans and Africans.

The study has been published by the journal Nature Genetics.