22 April 2015

AncestryDNA looks at People of the British Isles (POBI) results

The AncestryDNA blog has a new post Recent University of Oxford study sheds light on estimating Great Britain ethnicity giving the company perspective.
Examining their database they find "the greatest concentration of Scandinavian ancestry in the East Midlands and Northern England, and higher proportions of Europe West ancestry in the South East of England." These findings complement those in the study published in Nature and summarized at http://www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/oxford/field/field_document/POBInewsletter06_March2015.pdf .
The blog post attempts to manage expectations that those of us with British ancestry will see the benefit of the POBI research in our AncestryDNA results any time soon.

"Realizing this possibility for our AncestryDNA customers would require the right statistical tools and adequate DNA samples from the British Isles. First, we need to obtain adequate genetic data from individuals with deep ancestry in these regions. Second, more basic research is needed to translate these results to individualized ethnicity estimates."
As I understand it the method used in the POBI project, fineSTRUCTURE, is different from the ethnicity approach used by Ancestry. No doubt there are other obstacles. One thing we can be sure of, AncestryDNA will not want to get left behind Family Tree DNA or 23andMe in exploiting the new information. Isn't competition wonderful!

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