Month: May 2008

Interview Series II – Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak

Blaine Bettinger 10 Comments

image If you’ve ever even thought about testing your own DNA for genealogical purposes, then you are almost guaranteed to have heard of Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak. Megan is the Chief Family Historian and North American spokesperson for Ancestry.com, as well as the co-founder of Roots Television, an online channel of genealogy and history-oriented programming. Additionally, Megan is the co-author of “Trace Your Roots With DNA”, the premiere book on genetic genealogy (the other co-author, Ann Turner, will be featured later in this series).

Megan blogs about genetic genealogy and other genealogical topics at Megan’s Roots World (which I highly recommend adding to your feed reader or daily reading list). In the following interview, Megan talks about her introduction to genetic genealogy, about the field as it stands today, and about some of the possible future directions of DNA testing. ... Click to read more!

Interview Series I – Bennett Greenspan of Family Tree DNA

Blaine Bettinger 15 Comments

image Genetic genealogy has been commercially available since 2000, and in the last 8 years many genealogists have used this new tool to learn about their ancestry. Over the course of the next two weeks, I will be sharing interviews I recently conducted with 9 individuals who have had a huge impact on the field of genetic genealogy. The list includes – in the random order that their interview will appear – Bennett Greenspan, Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak, Terry Barton, Alastair Greenshields, Whit Athey, Ann Turner, Katherine Hope Borges, Max Blankfeld, and Ana Oquendo Pabón.

Just a quick disclaimer about the list of interviewed individuals before I begin this series. Genetic genealogy has become the valuable tool that it is due to the efforts of many people, but I was not able to interview everyone (and some were unable to commit the time to do an interview). I apologize to anyone that should be on the list but isn’t. ... Click to read more!

In Memoriam – Leo William Little

Blaine Bettinger 17 Comments

Last week the genetic genealogy community lost one of its treasured members, Leo W. Little.

Leo’s passing was announced on the GENEALOGY-DNA mailing list on Sunday evening. Since then, many members of that mailing list, the ISOGG Yahoo Group, and the DNA- ANTHROGENEALOGY Yahoo Group have expressed their sympathy to Leo’s family and expressed their admiration for his work and contributions to the field of genetic genealogy.

Leo was the administrator of at least two DNA Projects, including the null439 DNA Project, and the Little DNA Project. The null439 group was begun by Leo after he helped characterize the “Little SNP” in 2002, a SNP that is also called “L1” or “S26”. In 2005 Leo posted an email to the GENEALOGY-DNA that explained the discovery of the SNP, which defines the R1b1b2a1c Haplogroup in the new 2008 ISOGG Y-DNA Haplogroup Tree (previously known as R1b1c9a). The L1 SNP causes the primers used by Family Tree DNA to analyze Y-STR repeats at DYS439 to fail to anneal, and thus no result is recorded for that locus (i.e., it is “null”). The result is recorded as a default 12 with a blue asterisk. Here is Leo’s description from the null439 page: ... Click to read more!

TGG Accepted To The 9rules Network

Blaine Bettinger

9rules The Genetic Genealogist has been accepted to 9rules in the latest round of submissions! I’m honored to be accepted since 9rules is a collection of some of the best blogs around, and I hope that I can live up to the challenge. 9rules has a ‘technology’ community, but not a ‘science’ community; think there’s any chance they’ll start one? More news to come.

And don’t forget that starting next Tuesday I’m starting a great nine-part series of interviews with some of the biggest names in the field of genetic genealogy!

A Four-Part Series About Personal Genomics at Condé Nast Portfolio – Are Genetic Tests Really Useful?

Blaine Bettinger 2 Comments

iStock_000004876214XSmall Portfolio presents an interesting four-part series by David Ewing Duncan about personal genomics. But before I go on, it is important to realize that this series focuses on personal genomics – analysis of SNPs or sequencing throughout the genome – rather than the much narrower field of genetic genealogy. Although there are some ethical concerns surrounding genetic genealogy, they are not specifically addressed in the series.

Portfolio’s public relations coordinator circulated a summary of the series (I wish I had a PR coordinator!):

In Portfolio.com columnist David Ewing Duncan’s four-part series, “You 2.0,” he assess and compares three major websites recently launched that test a person’s DNA for risk-factors for everything from Alzheimer’s Disease and heart attack to drug addiction, an ability to taste bitterness, and ancestry. Is this information ready for prime time? Can it really predict a healthy person’s medical future? Duncan has been tested by 23andme, deCodeme, and Navigenics, and reports on his sometime contradictory and confusing, sometimes funny, and occasionally enlightening results gleaned from these controversial sites that are attempting to bring genetics directly to the people. ... Click to read more!

The Latest News About 23andMe

Blaine Bettinger 1 Comment

image For new readers of The Genetic Genealogist, 23andMe is a personal genomics company that offers a service to examine more than 600,000 SNPs throughout an individual’s genome. The information is then used to analyze ancestry (using Y-DNA and mtDNA) and to estimate propensity for disease. For much more info about 23andMe and similar companies, look under “Personal Genomics” on my Featured Articles page.

A Contest

Today, 23andMe announced on their blog – The Spittoon – the winner of the company’s first ‘Win Your Genome Contest’. The contest was to describe Lilly Mendel, a publicly available but anonymous profile at 23andMe – based upon her genetic information alone. The winner was Mike Cariaso, who previously created a program that analyzes 23andMe SNP data using the growing SNPedia database. ... Click to read more!

New Videos for Genetic Genealogists

Blaine Bettinger 1 Comment

While conducting some online research the other day, I discovered a series of videos about genetic genealogy by Alastair Greenshields, founder of DNA Heritage. The main page contains 6 videos (shown in the list below) that are broken down into 2 to 8 chapters. Since the videos are broken up into chapters, you can can easily skip to the topics that are the most relevant to you.

  1. Genetic Genealogy Terminology
  2. Genetic Genealogy Defined
  3. Tracing My Genetic Heritage
  4. My Past
  5. Giving DNA
  6. Genetic Genealogy Results

There are many other places to find videos about genetic genealogy. Last April I wrote “Ten Videos For Genetic Genealogists“, although only 8 of them are still available. You can also watch videos about DNA here at TGG’s DNA Channel, courtesy of Roots Television. And lastly, Family Tree DNA has videos available on its website.

To give you a preview of the DNA Heritage videos, the first is embedded below: ... Click to read more!

Welcome to The Genetic Genealogist!

Blaine Bettinger 2 Comments

tggfinal To the readers coming from yesterday’s article by George C. Morgan in The Ancestry Weekly Journal, welcome to The Genetic Genealogist! The eBook that George mentioned – I Have the Results of My Genetic Genealogy Test, Now What? – is available by simply clicking “Download Now” in the right sidebar.

If you are interested in reading more about genetic genealogy and personal genomics, visit my Featured Articles page for all of my favorite and most popular articles. And please subscribe to my feed to stay up-to-date on the latest in genetic genealogy news and information.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be featuring an interview series with some of the biggest names in genetic genealogy, so stay tuned!

Complete Neanderthal Genome Sequenced – Differs from CRS at 133 Positions

Blaine Bettinger 5 Comments

iStock_000003743546XSmall GenomeWeb Daily News published a story on Friday entitled “En route to Neandertal Genome, Researchers Analyze Its Complete Mitochondrial Genome” which revealed the results of recent Neanderthal mtDNA analysis.

On Thursday May 9th, Svante Pääbo spoke at the Biology of Genomes meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Pääbo’s group, along with 454 Life Sciences, is currently engaged in a project to sequence the Neanderthal genome. The researchers have been able to sequence the complete Neanderthal mtDNA genome with 35-fold coverage. The genome is approximately 16 kilobases long and differs from the CRS at 133 positions. From what I’ve been able to find online, it doesn’t appear that the actual sequencing results have been released to the public. Given current estimates of mtDNA mutation rates, the number of differences between human and Neanderthal mtDNA suggests that the branches diverged approximately 600,000 years ago. ... Click to read more!

Reproducibility of SNP Testing, Part II

Blaine Bettinger 7 Comments

imageThe Quantified Self has a follow-up to last week’s post about the reproducibility of SNP testing by 23andMe and deCODEme using Illumina SNP chips (see the Quantified Self’s post and my post). In that post, it was revealed that two comparisons of the 560,000 overlapping SNP results from the two different companies had revealed differences of just 23 locations for one individual and 35 for another.

Soon after last week’s post, one of these individuals – Ann Turner – contacted The Quantified Self with new information that 4 of the SNPs on her list of 35 disagreeing results are also on the other person’s list of 23 disagreeing results (Antonio Oliveira). From Ann’s email to The Quantified Self:

Four of those (rs11149566, rs4458717, rs4660646, and rs754499) were also found in Antonio’s list. That’s more than you would expect by chance. ... Click to read more!