Featured Article Academic Journal Main Category: Genetics Also Included In: IT / Internet / E-mail;Medical Devices / Diagnostics Article Date: 29 May 2012 - 11:00 PDT

Current ratings for: 'People's Geographic Origins Traceable With New Genetic Method'

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The team, from the University of California - Los Angeles (UCLA) Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, UCLA's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Tel Aviv University, write about their work in a paper published online in Nature Genetics on 20 May.

The researchers hope their method, which they call "spatial ancestry analysis" or SPA, will increase understanding of genetic diversity among populations, which in turn helps us better understand human disease and evolution.

Research areas that may benefit from the new method include finding links between genetic variants and disease and locating parts of genomes that have been subject to positive selection.

SPA is a software tool for analyzing spatial structure in genetic data. It models genotypes in two- and three-dimensional space.

With SPA researchers can model the spatial distributon of each genetic variant. And in this study, the team showed that particular frequency patterns of spatial distribution of gene variants are tied to particular geographic locations.

For genetic variants the team used SNPs ("snips", short for single-nucleotide polymorphisms) from various parts of the genome, including "the well-characterized LCT region, as well as at loci including FOXP2, OCA2 and LRP1B".

An SNP is a DNA sequence variation where there is a single nucleotide (A, T, C or G) difference in the "spelling" of the sequence.

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People's Geographic Origins Traceable With New Genetic Method

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