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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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’ […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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, […]
The 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 […]
I’ve added a new page to the blog called “Featured Articles“. It’s available 24/7 at the top of every page, and contains a categorized list of about 50 of my favorite articles from the last year. These posts are listed under categories including “Popular Articles”, “Personal Genomics”, “Learning About Genetic Genealogy”, […]
An Updated Y-DNA Tree at ISOGG
The International Society of Genetic Genealogy (ISOGG) announced today that their Tree Team has completed the 2008 version of the Y-DNA Haplogroup Tree. This revision was a major undertaking, because, as ISOGG states in the version history, “[t]he Karafet et al paper (2008) required a significant revision to […]
Although the genome scanning services offered by companies such as 23andMe, deCODEme, and SeqWright have been front and center in the press the last few weeks, I’m sure that the following information will not be included in any of the reports.
Comparisons
Two different sources have concluded that the scanning service offered by 23andMe and deCODEme, […]
Last week I received a press release announcing the creation of a non-profit organization to raise and disseminate funds to increase original research in genetic genealogy testing (some of which will undoubtedly be reported in the open-source Journal of Genetic Genealogy). The DNA Fund also has a blog, available here. Following is […]
 |