Re: Computer Program Reveals Anyone's Ancestry in Minutes

AaronParmenter@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Computer Program Reveals Anyone's Ancestry in Minutes
Gabrielle DeMarco
Rensselaer Polytechnic University
LiveScience.com

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in
partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Imagine being adopted, with no understanding of your cultural or
genetic background. You don't know your heritage or what diseases you
are genetically predisposed to. Most of us have some idea about the
roots of our family tree, but little understanding of what those lower
branches mean in terms of our predisposition to a host of diseases and
ailments.

Now, a group of computer scientists, mathematicians, and biologists
from around the world have developed a computer algorithm that can
quickly trace an individual's genetic ancestry with only a small
sample of their DNA. In fact, the program can trace the genetic
ancestry of thousands of individuals in minutes, without any prior
knowledge of their background.

The multi-disciplinary approach, published in the September 2007
edition of the journal PLoS Genetics, allowed the research team to
address this type of research in a novel way. Unlike previous computer
programs that required prior knowledge of an individual's ancestry and
background, the new algorithm looks for specific DNA markers known as
single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs (pronounced snips), and needs
nothing more than a DNA sample in the form of a simple cheek swab.

The researchers used genetic data from previous studies to perform and
confirm their research, including the new HapMap database, which is
working to uncover and map variations in the human genome.

"This work was an exciting opportunity to form an interdisciplinary
team of computer scientists, mathematicians, and human geneticists,"
said Petros Drineas, the senior author of the study and assistant
professor of computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

"Now that we have found that the program works well, we hope to
implement it on a much larger scale, using hundreds of thousands of
SNPs and thousands of individuals," said Drineas, who was funded by an
NSF CAREER award. "The program will be a valuable tool for
understanding our genetic ancestry and targeting drugs and other
medical treatments because it might be possible that these can affect
people of different ancestry in very different ways."

Understanding our unique genetic makeup is a crucial step to
unraveling the genetic basis for complex diseases. Although the human
genome is 99 percent the same from human to human, it is that 1
percent that can have a major impact on our response to diseases,
viruses, medications, and toxins. If researchers can uncover the
minute genetic details that set each of us apart, biomedical research
and treatments can be better customized for each individual, Drineas
said.

This program will help people understand their unique backgrounds and
aid historians and anthropologists in their study of where different
populations originated and how humans became such a hugely diverse,
global society.

The program was more than 99 percent accurate in trials and correctly
identified the ancestry of hundreds of individuals. This included
people from genetically similar populations (such as Chinese and
Japanese) and complex genetic populations like Puerto Ricans who can
come from a variety of backgrounds including Native American,
European, and African ancestries.

"When we compared our findings to the existing datasets, only one
individual was incorrectly identified and his background was almost
equally close between Chinese and Japanese," Drineas said. Drineas
explains that the results are preliminary, but extremely promising.
The team is now working to test their program on a much larger data
set.

In addition to Drineas, the algorithm was developed by scientists from
California, Puerto Rico, and Greece. The researchers involved include
lead author Peristera Paschou from the Democritus University of Thrace
in Greece; Elad Ziv, Esteban G. Burchard, and Shweta Choudhry from the
University of California, San Francisco; William Rodriguez-Cintron
from the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine in San Juan; and
Michael W. Mahoney from Yahoo! Research in California.

aaron

Why are press releases so content-free? Here's the techy version:
http://scitizen.com/screens/blogPage/viewBlog/sw_viewBlog.php?idTheme=28&idContribution=1102

--
Ian

Hotmail is for spammers. Real mail address is igoddard
at nildram co uk
.

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