Using genetics to determine continental origin

Dienekes Pontikos:

A very exciting new paper has just appeared in AJHG. The authors have used the 10,000+ SNP array by Affymetrix to study the individuals from the Y chromosome consortium panel. Note that these individuals were originally collected to study Y chromosomal variation, but in this case, they were studied because they represent a globally diverse set of people, and their genomic variation was studied.

The researchers were able to discern the population origin of these 76 individuals using just 10 SNPs. So, it only takes 10 nucleotides to infer whether someone is Sub-Saharan African, West Eurasian, East Asian, or Native American.

Of course, this ability could be due to overfitting in the small 76-individual sample. So, they tested against the larger 1000+ individual CEPH panel which includes 50+ populations from around the world, and were able to correctly infer the ancestry of all individuals.

Thus, it is demonstrated that a very small set of carefully selected polymorphisms are enough to discover the continental origin of an individual.

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