A study published online this week in Nature by an international team that included Cornell University researchers describes the use of DNA to predict the geographic origins of individuals from a sample of Europeans, often within a few hundred kilometers of where they were born.
"What we found is that within Europe, individuals with all four grandparents from a given region are slightly more similar genetically to one another, on average, than to individuals from more distant regions," said Carlos Bustamante, associate professor of biological statistics and computational biology at Cornell and the paper's senior author. John Novembre, an assistant professor in the University of California-Los Angeles' Department of Ecology and Evolution, was lead author of the study that also included researchers from GlaxoSmithKline, the University of Chicago and the University of Lausanne (Switzerland).
"When these minute differences are compounded across the whole of their genome, we have surprisingly high power to predict where in Europe they came from," Bustamante added.
This is one of the first studies to examine genome-wide patterns of genetic variation across a large sample of Europeans, and to use these data to predict ancestry. The methodology has wide-ranging implications for using DNA samples from unrelated individuals to identify genes underlying complex diseases, as well as forensics, personalized genomics and the study of recent human history.
