One baby, alone on a PCA island

One baby, alone on a PCA island

A week ago I reported that according to 23andMe I’m 40% Asian, and she is 8% Asian (in the future if I say “she” without explanation, you know of whom I speak). Obviously something is off here. The situation resolved itself when I tuned my parameters and increased my sampled populations in Interpretome. By now I’ve already done the estimates of recombination on the chromosomes which came together to produce her, and the realized value of 8 percent instead of 20 percent “Asian” simply can not be due to a particular set of unlikely crossing over events. From what I can gather it seems like ancestry painting should be viewed as a qualitative rather than a quantitative assessment. This sounds really strange when you are given percentages, but the results are strange, and obviously wrong too often in terms of the specific values.

Here’s an admixture plot which shows more realistically informative values:

I’ve run several admixture plots already with my daughter, and …

Razib Khan