Geographically precise autosomal tests?

[josh w.]

On Feb.9 2006 there was a P.B.S. program on African American history. In the program the narrator, Louis Gates Jr., was able to identify his specific African tribal origins by way of autosomal testing (Penn State). This would imply that autosomal tests can be as geographically precise as Y dna or Mtdna tests as long as one is not concerned with identifying a particular paternal or maternal line. Anyone have any further information on such geographically specific tests.

[MMaddi]

On Feb.9 2006 there was a P.B.S. program on African American history. In the program the narrator, Louis Gates Jr., was able to identify his specific African tribal origins by way of autosomal testing (Penn State). This would imply that autosomal tests can be as geographically precise as Y dna or Mtdna tests as long as one is not concerned with identifying a particular paternal or maternal line. Anyone have any further information on such geographically specific tests.

I watched the PBS program last night too and wondered the same thing. We must have missed the explanation, because there was a posting this morning on the Genealogy-DNA list about that. Here's the link: http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/read...-02/1139499128

The poster, who is a graduate student at the Univ. of Maryland and one of the amateur "gurus" on the J haplogroup, explains that the Penn State reearcher who performed the test on Gates took the African components of his autosomal DNA and compared them with clusters of various African tribal groups that matched. I believe he said Gates' African autosomal DNA component best matched the Mende tribe.

Mike Maddi

[josh w.]

Mike, I understood the strategy in a general sense. I wonder if this approach would be publically or commercially available . Thanks.
Josh

[GregKiroKH]

I still do not understand how they report to me the 172 Ancestory Information Markers (AIMS). I only found one acceptable journal article on the subject listing the markers, and since it was published in 2004, it did not have the complete 172 list. To be fair, there were other articles such as Frank W. Sweet's article "Afro-European Genetic Admixture in the United States," I found interesting to read. None the less, the autosomal test only seem to report if you are European, Asian, African, or Native-America. While I am interested to know these results for myself, I do not see the same data available to do research as I do with Y-DNA and Mitochondria DNA. After an hour of research with DYS, I had much more information that what I could find after looking at the PBS show.

<<The microarray itself is a silicon chip spotted with thousands of single strands of DNA, the densely-packed surface lets researchers analyze a huge number of markers -- 11,155 SNPs in all, as opposed to the 176 markers analyzed during traditional admixture testing
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/aalives/science_dna2.html>>

[Eternitat]

An autosomal test to determine specific geographic origins?

How much does it cost?

[GregKiroKH]

Oh, the journal article was in Forensic Science International 149 (2005) 279–286.

Announcement of Population Data
Allele frequencies for 70 autosomal SNP loci with
U.S. Caucasian, African-American, and Hispanic samples
Peter M. Vallone*, Amy E. Decker, John M. Butler
=======================================
Hey, TWGDAM, 1996, Technical Working Group on DNA Analysis Methods, already did some people's DNA. Informing the people involved would have been a saving of over $200.00? (They need to read Storza's comments on stereotyping)