Category: Genetics
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Personal genomics in two dimensions
The Pith: In this post I take a different tack at genetic data visualization. Instead of bar plots, I show how genetic relationships can be explored using two dimensional spaces. Last week I suggested that in some ways I had hit a wall of sharply reduc…
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Does your twin have “rights” on your genomes?
Randall Parker asks, Genetic Privacy And Identical Twins: Suppose you have a right to genetic privacy. You might believe you do. Suppose you have an identical twin. Suppose the identical twin decides to publish his (or her) genetic sequence on the web….
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Your genome is mine! (?)
Guest blogging at Genetic Future Mischa Angrist has a post up critiquing the defense of the lack of disclosure of genetic/genomic information to research participants. Mischa begins: Readers of Genetic Future, Genomics Law Report and Genomes Unzipped …
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Why siblings differ differently
The Pith: In this post I examine how looking at genomic data can clarify exactly how closely related siblings really are, instead of just assuming that they’re about 50% similar. I contrast this randomness among siblings to the hard & fast de…
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Diminishing returns of ancestry analysis (for me)
Zack has finally started posting results from HAP. To the left you see the results generated at K = 5 from his merged data set with the first 10 HAP members. I am HRP002. Zack is HRP001. Paul G., who is an ethnic Assyrian, is HRP010. Some others have already “outed” themselves, so I could…
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My family’s Neandertal genes, ii
Last week I reported that it turns out that one of my siblings carry a possible Neandertal haplotype on the dystrophin gene. To review, it seems likely that ~3% of the average non-African’s genome is derived from Neandertal populations. But by an…
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A genomic map of human variation, where we’re at
Zack has started exploring the K’s of his merged data set for HAP. A commenter suggests that: As you have begun interpreting the reference results, let me make a friendly warning: you have to keep in mind that most of the reference populations of…
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“Asian” in all the right places
mtDNA haplogroup G1a2 The pith: In this post I examine the most recent results from 23andMe for my family in the context of familial and regional (Bengal) history. I also use these results to offer up a framework for the ethnognesis of the eastern Ben…
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Harappa Ancestry Project, before the first wave
Zack has been posting his data sources, as well as how he filtered and formatted them, all this week. I assume that the first wave of results will be online soon. As of yesterday, this is what he had (I know he got some more today): – Punjab 7 – Bengal…
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Harappa Ancestry Project, before the first wave
Zack has been posting his data sources, as well as how he filtered and formatted them, all this week. I assume that the first wave of results will be online soon. As of yesterday, this is what he had (I know he got some more today): – Punjab 7 – Bengal…
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A ‘leaky’ model
John Farrell pointed me to this Anne Gibbons’ piece, A New View Of the Birth of Homo sapiens. Here’s some interesting passages: The new picture most resembles so-called assimilation models, which got relatively little attention over the yea…
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The scions of Shem?
The media is reporting rather breathlessly a new find out of Arabia which seems to push much further back the presence of anatomically modern humans in this region (more accurately, the archaeology was so sparse that assessments of human habitation see…
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Neandertal (haplotype) in the family!
There is pretty much a 100% probability that I carry Neandertal origin genes, since I’m Eurasian. That being said, I hadn’t looked too closely into the matter in regards to my own genome, because the whole “which SNPs are Neandertal&#…
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After the evolutionary revolution
Image credit: Luna04 My post The paradigm is dead, long live the paradigm! expressed to some extent my befuddlement at the current state of human evolutionary genetics and paleoanthropology. After the review of the paper of possible elevated admixtur…
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Visualizing variation, input → output
I have noted a few times that one thing you have to be careful about in two dimensional plots which show genetic variance is that the dimensions in which the data are projected upon are often generated from the data itself. So adding more data can chan…
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Neandertal admixture, revisiting results after shaken priors
After 2010′s world-shaking revolutions in our understanding of modern human origins, the admixture of Eurasian hominins with neo-Africans, I assumed there was going to be a revisionist look at results which seemed to point to mixing between diffe…
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23andMe v3 chip & me
Yesterday the first batch of results from 23andMe’s v3 chip came online. Instead of 550,000 SNPs you get ~1 million. The difference is pretty clear when you look at the raw SNPs. Under Account → Browse Raw Data, I can enter LCT, and this is wha…
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Harappa Ancestry Project, update
Last week I announced the Harappa Ancestry Project. It now has its own dedicate website, http://www.harappadna.org. Additionally, it has its own Facebook page. For Zack to get his own URL he needs about 10 more “likes,” so please like it! (…
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The genomic heritage of French Canadians
Image Credit: Anirudh Koul One of the great things about the mass personal genomic revolution is that it allows people to have direct access to their own information. This is important for the more than 90% of the human population which has sketchy ge…
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Friends & genes & heritability
A few people have inquired of the PNAS paper On sharing genes with friends. I avoided comment in part because I’m skeptical of the findings. So much behavior genomics just hasn’t panned out over the long term, and is probably susceptible t…