Slashdot Mirror
Researchers Develop DNA GPS Tool To Accurately Trace Geographical Ancestry
Zothecula (1870348) writes "An international team of scientists has developed a process that allows them to pinpoint a person's geographical origin going back 1,000 years. Known as the Geographic Population Structure (GPS) tool, the method is accurate enough to locate the village from which the subject's ancestors came, and has significant implications for personalized medical treatment."
Just to be clear, they only did this for two populations of people: Sardinia and polynesia, both of which have the nice property that they are isolated and thus would not mix very much with the rest of the human population.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Yes, I don't see that the technique is discussed for people whose ancestors don't all come from one place.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Well you can use statistics. The people who currently live in the village probably have a strong correlation to a particular gene structure, Then the further out you go the correlation diminishes. So we get a good old bell curve.
So if you take one in a different area and you see that they would correlate better to a different area, then chances are their family probably had came from there.
We can tell in the United States already if someone is native to America, Asia, Europe, or Africa. We can know this without going back in time or checking history books to figure it out. You can just look at the existing population. If you go to the Europe, Sure there are people of other races but most of them are White. If your skin is white too, chances are your family came from that area of the world.
With genetics, We can break things down to a much finer detail... But the idea is still the same,
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Don't read the moronic gizmag article. (yeah I know, /., as if)
See this:
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2...
It's pretty cool stuff.
I have a DNA sequence from 23andme. I'd like to see the first service do any kind of analysis where I can upload my genome sequence and see the results of the analysis.
The service already exists, though they did a good job of not posting the link to http://www.prosapiagenetics.co...
However, it isn't until you get pretty far along in uploading your data that they try to hit you up for a fee (something like $20-50).
I think this would probably work in my case.
My Mom's people come from the Channel Islands, and while her ancestors did a lot of night visiting to French and English shores, it was mostly to smuggle goods, not so much for the nookie. These days, the Jervais pretty much continue their illicit activities but for now they do so "within the law" as International Bankers--- a different kind of piracy. But that's neither here nor there.
The point is that in 1066, roughly 25 generations back, my Mom had 33 million ancestors, and just about all of them were from the Channel Islands which never had a living population of more a few tens of thousands. So she was definitely the product of a homogenous gene pool. Not inbreeding as such, but more a churning of a healthy gene pool with very little else mixed in.
On the other side, my Dad's ancestry is well documented through parish records and the Domeday Book to 1066, and a small corner of Merrie Olde England that was awarded to a distant ancestor (of Flemish origin) who joined William the Conqueror in his grand adventure. The records show that those ancestors did not stray outside of a pretty discrete gene pool until one of them crossed the pond in the 1500s to settle on Long Island. There was certainly some mixing going on then for a hundred years or so, what with the taking of young squaws as slaves when New England Indian tribes needed to be subdued, and then there were the cute little Dutch girls of New Amsterdam. But my progenitors did pretty much stay in one particular part of Long Island until my Dad and Mom met in college, and settled near Boston to raise me and my sibs.
So assuming even a tremendous amount of adulteration of the lineage when the American branch of my Dad's ancestry formed, that's still 2,050 ancestors mostly from an area in Long Island that never has had a living population of more than a few hundred. So even on my Dad's side, the genetic mix has almost certainly been homogenous and identifiable within perhaps a hundred mile radius of Setauket, Long Island, NY.
I'm guessing that GPS would easily identify my Channel Island ancestry, and identify that my other roots were Old Stock New England (if that terminology is still in use). So yeah, I think this technique might have some merit. But how much value it might have in dx and tx of diseases is questionable: there is a huge amount of research that would need to be done before more than a handful of diseases could be associated in any way with genetic predispositions.
I have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents, 32 great-great-great-grandparents, and so on. I was discussing a while ago that 53 generations ago (perhaps 1325=53*25 years ago, if a generation takes 25 years to cycle) I had 2^53=9,007,199,254,740,992 different ancestors, if there was no inbreeding. There was obviously some inbreeding, because even today there are only about 7,000,000,000 people on the planet, give or take. But amongst those 9,007,199,254,740,992 people 1325 years ago there is a high chance that some were from Europe, some from Africa, some from Asia, but there is a much lesser chance that some were Native Americans, or native Australians, or the now extinct, native Tasmanians. I probably share quite a bit of common ancestry with Native Americans too, probably even more than with subSaharan Africans, but it has to go back to a time before they crossed the Behring Strait between Siberia and Alaska, unless some intermixed with Eskimos up north, who in turn got around to the other continents and transported ancestry that way, after the Behring strait was crossed. My most distant relatives are probably the native Australians, but even they came from Africa less than 200,000 years ago, because that's when modern humans first appeared.
If they can pinpoint exactly which village you came from, then you have a severe inbreeding problem, because every village should have people from hundreds of other villages, and such variation shouldn't be duplicated from village to village, so on a country level, out of say 10-50 million people you're probably talking at least half a million different villages they could have come from. Everyone's unique, everyone has a different fingerprint - unless they are genetically identical twins. People will sometimes prefer their very own kind, but sometimes someone very distant as an inbreeding fighting measure. Who you find physically attractive is a very subtle process, as you both are responsible for yourself first, then your family, then your kind, but you have to protect yourself, your family and your kind from inbreeding defects too. Everyone is responsible for themselves, if you take care of yourself, then I don't have to, you're helping me out a lot by taking care of yourself. If you take care of your family and kids, then I don't have to, you're helping me out a lot again. If you take care of your own kind, then I don't have to, you're helping me out a lot again. Am I my brother's keeper? Sometimes I cannot afford to be. I cannot expect you to care about someone else's children more, or even equally, to how you care about your own. If you disagree, we have a whole lot of court cases where paternity issues are fought, and all you gotta do is show up and offer that they don't need to fight in court, because you will accept the child support deductions from your paycheck, for millions of cases that happen. Or if you cannot accept a million deductions, just do one such case. Chances are you will not go for it, and be altruistic like that to a random stranger. Most people that adopt a child as their own, they don't just get a paycheck deduction, but they get human contact out of it, so in a sense it's selfish. However there are lots of catholic charities that collect donations for say, kids in the Philippines, and the people get a picture of the child in exchange, but you can only do that if you take care of your own turf first, I also cannot expect you to care more about me, than yourself. Though there are martyrs, heroes, kamikaze's, who will take care of their kind before taking care of themselves, but in a sense they are taking care of themselves better by taking care of their kind, than if they took care of themselves themselves. Your ultimate kind is human, and we could even get as specieist as saying that we'd be willing to see every other creature and species disappear if that saved humans, but we would probably not be racist enough to say that we'd be willing to see every other human race disappear to save our own, or every o