Dangling Conversations

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Deep ancestry

Posted 16 Apr, 2005 at 14:44 by matt in /Science | Permanent link

The National Geographic Society is sponsoring what they call the genographic project: a broad study to confirm or disprove the out of Africa hypothesis of human development. That's pretty cool; what's even cooler is that you can participate by sending in a buccal DNA sample and have your deep ancestry traced.

I know that at least some of the folks hereabouts are interested in genealogy, so I'm wondering what the general reaction to this is. It costs 100USD; will you do it? Would you do it if it was cheaper?

One thing which kind of puzzles me about it: they do one of two tests on the genetic material, one for men (Y-chromasome) and one for women (mitochondrial DNA). I understand why the first is infeasible for women, but is there a reason that one can't study the mitochondrial DNA of a man? Or maybe it's possible, and they're trying to keep the workload reasonable by only doing one analysis per sample?

Comments (6 comments so far)
No reason not to do a mitochondrial study for guys. Likely if you were to send twice the money they would do both analyses for you. Given that mitochondria are inherited from your mother only (which is actually part of the theory as to why there are two sexes) it would be interesting to look at both...maybe they just didn't want girls to feel left out.
Posted 2005/4/16 15:22:10 by wendy
Actually...now that I've read it, they seem to want to use the results as part of a study, so I guess maybe they don't want guys to count for twice as much data as girls. Not that they're getting a random sample...kinda cute actually, get your subjects to pay for your study. Speaking of which, you wouldn't catch me paying for the study I'm currently participating in...they're paying me quite a bit of money to spend the day in the hospital and biopsy my cheeks at 4 hour intervals.
Posted 2005/4/16 15:25:37 by wendy
I had a roommate once in Toronto who was perennially short of work: one of the hazards of being up-and-coming in the film biz, I guess. Whenever he was particularly short of funds, he'd check himself into Biovail, a pharma/med-tech company with offices in Scarborough. $200/day for being a test subject, sometimes for studies that last up to a week or more.
Posted 2005/4/16 15:46:58 by Matt
I was recently reading that there's a lot less diversity on the Y chromosome than X, mainly because there's much more variability in the # of offspring / person for males than females. I can't tell, though, whether this lack of variability would help or hinder the ancestry study.
Posted 2005/4/16 17:28:15 by Nikita
It helps it a great deal for deep ancestry. If you can find a match on a significant number of markers, the odds of it being a relationship are fairly high, even going back 100 generations or more. I believe the expected mutation rate is something like .002 % per generation.
Posted 2005/4/19 07:55:06 by Blue
In fact, you might find the following page interesting... http://nitro.biosci.arizona.edu/ftdna/TMRCA.html
Posted 2005/4/19 07:57:55 by Blue
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