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A genetic tree as a movie: Moving beyond the still portrait of ancestry
https://phys.org/news/2025-03-genetic-tree-movie-portrait-ancestry.htmlI thought this might be interesting to some.
University of Michigan researchers have developed a statistical method that can be used for such wide-ranging applications as tracing your ancestry, modeling disease spread and studying how animals spread through geographic regions. Their results are published in the journal Science.
One of the method's applications is to give a more complete sense of human ancestry, says Gideon Bradburd, U-M professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. For example, when you send your DNA off for a personalized ancestry report, the report you get back is only a very small view of your family tree pinned to a specific point and space in time.
These types of genetic reports reflect the amount of a person's genome that they've inherited from individuals living in a specific area at a specific point in the past. "If your ancestry report says that you're 50% Irish, that means you have a lot of second through fourth cousins who currently live in Ireland," says Bradburd. But in reality, your family tree is much more like a movie than this snapshot.
The statistical method developed by Bradburd and fellow U-M researchers Michael Grundler and Jonathan Terhorst can give people a "movie" version of their ancestry, showing where their ancestors originated and how they moved across the globe.
. . .
One of the method's applications is to give a more complete sense of human ancestry, says Gideon Bradburd, U-M professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. For example, when you send your DNA off for a personalized ancestry report, the report you get back is only a very small view of your family tree pinned to a specific point and space in time.
These types of genetic reports reflect the amount of a person's genome that they've inherited from individuals living in a specific area at a specific point in the past. "If your ancestry report says that you're 50% Irish, that means you have a lot of second through fourth cousins who currently live in Ireland," says Bradburd. But in reality, your family tree is much more like a movie than this snapshot.
The statistical method developed by Bradburd and fellow U-M researchers Michael Grundler and Jonathan Terhorst can give people a "movie" version of their ancestry, showing where their ancestors originated and how they moved across the globe.
. . .