Ancestry DNA presentation

The speaker is a computational biologist who works on the Ancestry DNA project. Before coming to Ancestry he worked on statistical research in genetic mutations that lead to disease. There's been research that shows that large ethnic groups have different DNA that can be traced back to the origin, but even more recently some research has shown that differences can even be traced to small communities (e.g. regions of the UK), so we can get even more fine-grained accuracy.

Another problem arises when we look at finding cousins based on DNA received from similar ancestors. I feel like it would be very difficult to recognize that two people are cousins just by DNA, since it dilutes so quickly.

Also, I had no idea network theory was involved in DNA research. But it makes sense, since genealogy is just a huge network. They also used machine learning to accomplish classifications by DNA, which is really cool because I'd never thought to use machine learning for that!

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