Special Issue "Molecular Application of Mass Spectrometry and Chromatography in Biomedicine".

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder worldwide. It is characterized clinically by tremor, rigidity, bradykinesia, and postural instability, and neuropathologically by selective dopaminergic neuron loss in the substantia nigra with Lewy bodies composed primarily of α-synuclein. Although a minority of PD cases arise from rare, high-penetrance variants, most cases are polygenic and multifactorial. Common variants of modest effect collectively account for a meaningful portion of PD heritability; the largest European-ancestry meta-GWAS to date identified 90 independent risk signals explaining an estimated 16–36% of the heritable risk. Yet the field’s understanding of PD genetics remains disproportionately derived from European cohorts, with fewer large-scale studies in East Asian and Taiwanese populations. Both clinical features and genetic risk architectures show ancestry-related differences. Asian patients, for example, have lower reported rates of motor complications such as dyskinesia than European patients, and several PD risk alleles differ in frequency and effect size across populations. Notably, the p.G2019S founder variant is enriched in European and certain West Asian groups, whereas p.G2385R and p.R1628P are established risk alleles in individuals of East Asian ancestry. At , ancestry-specific patterns have also been described: association signals and local haplotype structure vary by population, and distinct rs356182-centered haplotypes show different relationships to risk in Latino and European cohorts, highlighting locus complexity relevant to non-European populations as well. In , recent GWAS in African cohorts have likewise identified novel PD risk variants among individuals of African ancestry.