The Sardinian meter
I cropped the image above from the paper Inference of Population Structure using Dense Haplotype Data. The main reason was emphasize the distinctiveness of the Sardinian cluster, on the bottom right. As you can see this population exhibits a lot of co…
On phylogenetic instrumentalism
ADMIXTURE and STRUCTURE tests aren’t formal mixture tests. Yes! In fact, in the “open science” community this issue is repeated over and over and over, because people routinely get confused (our audience does not consist of population gen…
The GIF of genomics
As you may know the interminable Myriad genetics patents case has been making waves in the courts, most recently with mixed results as to whether their patents on several specific genetic diagnostics are valid. This aspect needs to be highlighted:
One…
Not all homozygosity is created the same (way)
Browsing the most recent issue of The American Journal of Human Genetics I stumbled upon a paper with some neat figures, Genomic Patterns of Homozygosity in Worldwide Human Populations. More specifically they focused on patterns of “runs of homo…
Ötzi – more Neandertal than the average bear
Neandertal ancestry “Iced”:
Evaluating recent evolution, migration and Neandertal ancestry in the Tyrolean Iceman
Paleogenetic evidence from Neandertals, the Neolithic and other eras has the potential to transform our knowledge of human po…
Neanderthal admixture & the ecology of academe
Yesterday I pointed out that David Reich had a moderately dismissive attitude toward the new paper in PNAS, Effect of ancient population structure on the degree of polymorphism shared between modern human populations and ancient hominins. Here’s …
The Jewish Diaspora: not an empire of the mind
Berber queen?
In light of the previous post you know that I was going to post on the new paper in PNAS, North African Jewish and non-Jewish populations form distinctive, orthogonal clusters. Additionally, the press people at Albert Einstein did reach …
Ashkenazi Jews are probably not descended from the Khazars
A few people have asked me about a new paper on arXiv, The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses. Since it is on arXiv you can read the preprint yourself. And, since it is a preprint it is not …
Humanity 2.0
Dienekes points to a David Reich video where he shows his hand as to future possible results to come out of his lab. The short of it is that it seems likely that most agricultural populations exhibit the same dynamic outlined in Reconstructing Indian H…
Azores to Atlantis: Africa through the shadows
In many ways the image of Africa in the minds of Westerners has become a trope. The “Dark Continent,” eternal, and primal. Like many tropes the realized existence of this Africa is only within the imagination. The real Africa is far differ…
Ashkenazi Jews are not inbred
Jews, and Ashkenazi Jews in particular, are very genetically distinctive. A short and sweet way to think about this population is that they’re a moderately recent admixture between a Middle Eastern population, and Western Europeans, which has bee…
The first, second, and third nations
By now you’ve probably read about the paper which reports that there seem to have been three waves of humans migrating into the New World prior to the arrival of Europeans. A major aspect of this result is that it does not emerge out of a vacuum,…
The privileges and burdens of a novel inversion
There’s two papers in Nature Genetics on the 17q21.31, and variation of haplotypes of inversions in world wide populations. Here’s a part of the discussion from the first paper:
In conclusion, we propose that the ancestral H2′ haplotype a…
Two pulses of white admixture in American slaves?
I noticed today an interesting paper in Genetics by Simon Gravel, Population Genetics Models of Local Ancestry. As indicated by the title this is a general paper where the method is the main course. But, there was an interesting empirical result which …
The rise of the rare variant
A few people have mentioned to me a couple of new papers in Science are out on rare variants. They’re summed up in a short review article. I suspect this is going to be a big deal for some time. For humans we are coming to toward the end of the …
Sleeping like a Neandertal
Forgot to highlight one of the coolest abstracts from SMBE 2012, A genomewide map of Neandertal ancestry in modern humans:
2. The map allows us to identify Neandertal alleles that have been the target of selection since introgression. We identified ove…
Sleeping like a Neandertal
Forgot to highlight one of the coolest abstracts from SMBE 2012, A genomewide map of Neandertal ancestry in modern humans:
2. The map allows us to identify Neandertal alleles that have been the target of selection since introgression. We identified ove…
Not out of Sheba
Liya Kebede, Credit
There is a new paper, Ethiopian Genetic Diversity Reveals Linguistic Stratification and Complex Influences on the Ethiopian Gene Pool, which is being sensationalized in the media. For example, the BBC headline: ‘DNA clues to …
Genes in space
From some of the same people who brought you the genetic map of Europe, a very important paper, A model-based approach for analysis of spatial structure in genetic data. Here’s the abstract:
Characterizing genetic diversity within and between po…