News from the 11th International Conference on Genetic Genealogy

[Armando]

There is some interesting news from the 11th International Conference on Genetic Genealogy posted by Jennifer Zinck at http://www.ancestorcentral.com/11th-...tic-genealogy/

Subjects in the blogpost:

Swedish DNA testing
Ancient DNA
2nd version of MyOrigins with new clusters
Planned Gedcom improvements
Geno 2.0 Next Gen
Sephardic in MyOrigins

[NCroots]

Intersting information-- thank you for posting, Armando!

[phje]

Thanks, Armando. I appreciate the link.

I really wish they would do something about the Native American reference populations in MyOrigins. Even Population Finder did a better job, at least when it came to NA. I still don't understand how removing three NA reference populations helped anyone.

[Karim]

Thank you great article.

[MMaddi]

Thanks, Armando. I appreciate the link.

I really wish they would do something about the Native American reference populations in MyOrigins. Even Population Finder did a better job, at least when it came to NA. I still don't understand how removing three NA reference populations helped anyone.

I was there at the conference, but don't have a lot of time tonight to report various things. Since you do bring up Native American in myOrigins, there was good news about that.

Razib Khan gave a presentation on autosomal DNA, which started with some changes in myOrigins. I don't have detailed notes on what he said, but I did write down that he admitted that presently myOrigins gives some people false negative results for Native American. In other words, they do have Native American ancestry, but myOrigins' algorithm doesn't detect it. He didn't state how common a false negative result is for those with Native American ancestry.

Razib said there will be changes in their reference samples for Native American ancestry that will at least partially solve the problem of false negative results. If I remember correctly, it involves separating the South American tribal samples from those samples which mainly relate to Native American ancestry from North America. That would obviously be helpful for non-Hispanics with colonial American ancestry who have some family traditions or evidence of Native American ancestry. He seemed to be saying that, if someone has North American Native American ancestry, comparing them to a reference sample that includes South American Native Americans could yield a false negative result.

[phje]

MMaddi,

Thanks for taking the time to share this. I hope that it will be an improvement.

[Marianne]

About Native American, it seems Finland and Siberia will be two separate cluster too, which will help pinpoint more recent addition to Native American signal.

Especially in Canada were Native Canadians have been mixing with Inuits regularly since a few millenia.

[Septem27]

I'm curious if it will have a chromosome painting feature?

[cbeck]

Changes to My Origins

So why exactly have the changes to MyOrigins not been implemented and are they to not occur or just substantially delayed? If they are to proceed what kind of a time frame are we looking at now?

[Odis]

the rumors were around here that a refinement was coming this past March to MyOrigins, but March has come and gone as we approach August and no word has showed up from FTDNA, so the safe bet is, nothing is coming to MyOrigins, but lets hope something is on the horizon....

[cbeck]

Conference announcement

I would think announcement at the International genetic genealogy conference would be considered more then a rumor.

[wombat]

I think it will happen later this year. I'm suspicious that they are working with Geno 2.0 NG and will get use of all their private samples (just as it seems like Geno 2.0 is now using FTDNA software and seemingly at this point only the FTDNA database since Geno 2.0 NG and MyOrigins seems to have the same groups and same results at this point). So I think what currently happens is that Geno 2.0 NG is MyOrigins but with better maps and a look at Geno's reference populations results and more information. And I think after the updates I think Geno 2.0 NG will become Geno again and not just MyOrigins and will use all of their private database and other info and that MyOrigins will then become Geno (but still probably use their own versions of maps and not show the Geno reference sample and other information) although it's possible Geno 2.0 NG chip has some extra SNPs that will come into use but only, obviously, for Geno 2.0 NG.