A revolutionary technique makes it possible for a person to trace his ancestor's home from 1,000 years ago through his DNA.
Genealogy has become the number one hobby in the United States and suddenly everyone wants to trace their ancestry. According to statistics, more than a million Americans have already had their DNA genotyped. Companies such as 23andme orancestry.com charge anything between $99 and $200 for their services in this regard.
University of Sheffield researchers seemed to have jumped onto this bandwagon and have developed a revolutionary technique that makes it possible for a person to trace his ancestor's home from 1,000 years ago through his DNA.
Currently, scientists have only been able to detect a person's DNA origin within a radius of 700 km. However, Dr Eran Elhaik from the University of Sheffield's Department of Animal and Plant Sciences claims that the new technique has a 98 percent accuracy rate of locating worldwide populations to their right geographic regions, down to their village and island of origin.
Being able to trace the gene pool where a person's DNA was last mixed has life-saving implications, according to the researchers. Genetic admixture usually takes place when people from two or more previously separated populations interbreed, leading to the creation of a new gene pool. Due to migration and invasions, this process was very common in ancient history.
"If we think of our world as being made up of different colors of soup - representing different populations - it is easy to visualize how genetic admixture occurs. If a population from the blue soup region mixes with a population from the red soup region their offspring would appear as a purple soup," Elhaik said in a statement. "The more genetic admixture that takes place, the more different colors of soup are introduced which makes it increasingly difficult to locate your DNA's ancestry using traditional tools like Spatial Ancestry analysis (SPA) which has an accuracy level of less than two per cent."
The new tool has been named Geographic Population Structure (GPS). To prove its effectiveness, Elhaik and his team visited 10 villages in Sardinia and over 20 islands in Oceania, collecting data. The researchers then confirmed that they were able to accurately place one fourth of Sardinia residents directly to their home village and most of the remaining residents within 50km of their village. They also achieved a 90 percent success rate in Oceania.
"This is a significant improvement compared to the alternative SPA tool that placed Oceanians in India," said Elhaik. "In his third book, children's author L. Frank Baum revealed that Oz resided around Australia. It always troubled me that if I ever met anyone claiming to be from the wonderful world of Oz, I would like to be able to verify their origins and now we can!"
GPS is accessible to the public, thanks to study co-author, Dr Tatiana Tatarinova's newly developed website. It allows anyone who has had their DNA genotyped to upload their results and use GPS to find their ancestral home.
"We were surprised by the simplicity and precision of this method. People in a given geographical area are more likely to have similar genetics. When they also have genetic traits typically found in other, distant regions, the geographical origin of those traits is generally the closest location where those traits can be found," Dr Tatiana Tatarinova said.
The new tool also has medical implications. Determining certain genotypes may indicate the potential for a genetic disease and suggest that diagnostic testing be done.
The new study was published in the journal Nature Communications
