More diversity in the Personal Genome Project
Seeking Diversity (Especially Families): Because the PGP is self-recruiting, we don’t have a very balanced set of participants. “Self-recruitment” means that all participants have enrolled in our project through word of mouth, finding our website and enrolling online. To put it bluntly, that means we mostly end up with young white men…. …Research within one […]
Layering genetic histories
As a follow up to my post from yesterday, I decided to run TreeMix on a data set I happened to have had on hand (see Inference of Population Splits and Mixtures from Genome-Wide Allele Frequency Data for more on TreeMix). Basically I wanted to display a tree with, and without, gene flow. The technical […]
Africa’s hidden people hold the keys to the past
I mentioned this in passing on my post on ASHG 2012, but it seems useful to make explicit. For the past few years there has been word of research pointing to connections between the Khoisan and the Cushitic people of Ethiopia. To a great extent in the paper which is forthcoming there is the likely […]
Northern Europeans and Native Americans are not more closely related than previously thought
A new press release is circulating on the paper which I blogged a few months ago, Ancient Admixture in Human History. Unlike the paper, the title of the press release is misleading, and unfortunately I notice that people are circulating it, and probably misunderstanding what is going on. Here’s the title and first paragraph: Native […]
Northern Europeans and Native Americans are not more closely related than previously thought
A new press release is circulating on the paper which I blogged a few months ago, Ancient Admixture in Human History. Unlike the paper, the title of the press release is misleading, and unfortunately I notice that people are circulating it, and probably misunderstanding what is going on. Here’s the title and first paragraph: Native […]
The Genographic Project’s Scientific Grants Program
While I was at Spencer Wells’ poster at ASHG I was primarily curious about bar plots. He’s got really good spatial coverage, so I’m moderately excited about the paper (though I didn’t see much explicit testing of phylogenetic hy…
Reflections on the evolution at ASHG 2012
As most readers know I was at ASHG 2012. I’m going to divide this post in half. First, the generalities of the meeting. And second, specific posters, etc.
Generalities:
– Life Technologies/Ion Torrent apparently hires d-bag bros to represent them…
Inflammatory bowel syndrome is nature’s side effect
Last week Luke Jostins (soon to be Dr. Luke Jostins) published an interesting paper in Nature. To be fair, this paper has an extensive author list, but from what I am to understand this is the fruit of the first author’s Ph.D. project. In any cas…
Why chimpanzees can donate blood in movies
There is a high likelihood that you know of which ABO blood group you belong to. I am A. My daughter is A. My father is B. My mother is A. I have siblings who are A, O, B, and AB. The inheritance is roughly Mendelian, with O being “recessiveR…
Buddy can you spare a selective sweep
The Pith: Natural selection comes in different flavors in its genetic constituents. Some of those constituents are more elusive than others. That makes “reading the label” a non-trivial activity.
As you may know when you look at patterns of…
Most mtDNA lineages expanded before the Neolithic?
A new short communication in Scientific Reports suggests that most demographic expansion as ascertained using mtDNA occurred before the Neolithic. MtDNA analysis of global populations support that major population expansions began before Neolithic Time…
A dangerous man
I was a little sad when I heard my friend Steve Hsu had accepted a position at Michigan State some months back. My reasons were two-fold. First, I swing by Eugene now and then, and I wouldn’t have the opportunity to drop in on his office. Second,…
Signal of Indo-Aryan admixture in South Indian Brahmins
I’ve mentioned a few times that the Reich lab has been finding suggestive evidence for admixture between indigenous South Asians and a West Eurasian group on the order of ~3,000 years before the present. The modal explanation is probably an Indo-…
The Bushmen tell us a lot about human evolution because they are humans who have evolved
When it comes to the human genetics of the Khoe-San there’s a little that’s stale and unoriginal for me in terms of presentation. The elements are always composed the same. The Bushmen are the “most ancient” humans, who can tell…
The brambly bush of humanity
Over at Haldane’s Sieve there are more than preprints posted, there are commentaries from the authors as well. For example, for The genetic prehistory of southern Africa, the first author, Dr. Joseph K. Pickrell, has a extended comment up.
But oc…
Across the sea of grass: how Northern Europeans got to be ~10% Northeast Asian
The Pith: You’re Asian. Yes, you!
A conclusion to an important paper, Nick Patterson, Priya Moorjani, Yontao Luo, Swapan Mallick, Nadin Rohland, Yiping Zhan, Teri Genschoreck, Teresa Webster, and David Reich:
In particular, we have presented ev…
Deep dive into the Denisovans
By now you have probably seen the new Denisovan paper in the media. John Hawks has an excellent overview, as you’d expect. The only thing I will add is to reiterate that I think population movements in near and far prehistory significantly obscur…
Not all genes are created the same
The map to the right shows the frequencies of HGDP populations on SLC45A2, which is a locus that has been implicated in skin color variation in humans. It’s for the SNP rs16891982, and I yanked the figure from IrisPlex: A sensitive DNA tool for a…
Evolutionary & population genetics preprints – Haldane’s Sieve
OK, perhaps I can help with that. Dr. Coop speaks of the collaboration between himself & Dr. Joseph Pickrell, Haldane’s Sieve, which I added to my RSS days ago (and you can see me pushing it to my Pinboard). From the “About”:
As …
Consent and genomics
Interesting story in The New York Times, Genes Now Tell Doctors Secrets They Can’t Utter:
One of the first cases came a decade ago, just as the new age of genetics was beginning. A young woman with a strong family history of breast and ovarian cancer…