Posted by Julie Granka on August 2, 2013 in Science

If we already had all the answers, there wouldn’t be any more science to do.

Pie charts and percentages tell AncestryDNA customers the story of where their ancestors probably lived, and lists of DNA matches help them to find living relatives and expand their family trees.  Behind those results are terabytes of data, years of hard work, and a lot of rigorous science.

Behind this science is the AncestryDNA science team.  This team of ten really smart people and 15 advanced degrees (nine of which are PhD’s) make current and future features of AncestryDNA possible.

On the science team, we ask lots of questions.  To answer those questions, we analyze vast amounts of genetic data, write and test (and debug) a lot of computer programs, calculate volumes of telling statistics, and make tons of detailed graphs. We then get really excited about all of those graphs and statistics, discuss our findings, generate more questions, and do it all over again.

This science is at the forefront of major advancements in human genetics.  Its ultimate goal is to provide our customers with the best information for making discoveries about their family stories.

By nature, our scientific research is iterative and cyclical.

Genetic ethnicity and relationships based on genetic data have to be estimated.  Our estimates deal with uncertainties, since inheriting DNA from your parents and through the generations is a random process.  We also make our estimates based on sets of assumptions and approximations that model recent human genetic history.

As you might imagine, that history is really complicated, and there are a number of different ways that we could model itWith further scientific advancements, we can continue to construct better and better approximations of the way things happen in the real world.  That means better AncestryDNA estimates.

That brings us back to the science team’s experiments and tests.  When we gather new data or develop methods that will improve DNA results, we push to implement them.  Our customers’ DNA results are based on a lot of thorough science, and our curiosity and scientific rigor continue to drive us.  Future advancements you’ll see in the AncestryDNA experience benefit from the scientific breakthroughs that we are making today.

So as the current science underlying our estimates of genetic ethnicity and genetic relatives progresses, so will the ethnicity and matching results.  Iterative improvements to AncestryDNA results are evidence of the sweat of the science team, and AncestryDNA customers directly benefit from our research.

By studying the unique collection of data that is part of our experiments, we are also generating novel scientific knowledge.  As part of this unique collection of data, our customers are helping us to uncover a great deal of fascinating information about human migrations and genetic genealogy.  Our findings have been and will continue to be released to the broader scientific community through publications, conferences, and this blog.

In future posts, I’ll give the technical details of our research projects. I’ll reveal our latest scientific conclusions, explain the challenging issues we are seeing and how we are addressing them, and describe how our research advances AncestryDNA – and ultimately affects you.

In the meantime, we’ll be doing some really cool science.

Julie Granka

Julie has been a population geneticist at AncestryDNA since May 2013. Before that, Julie received her Ph.D. in Biology and M.S. in Statistics from Stanford University, where she studied genetic data from human populations and developed computational tools to answer questions about population history and evolution. She also spent time collecting and studying DNA using spit-collection tubes like the ones in an AncestryDNA kit. Julie likes to spend her non-computer time enjoying the outdoors – hiking, biking, running, swimming, camping, and picnicking. But if she’s inside, she’s baking, drawing, and painting.

Comments

    • Julie Granka

      Thank you for your interest, Richard. After taking a DNA test, an individual may see where their genetic ethnicity estimates and the birth locations in their tree line up. In addition, one can compare the birth locations in their own tree to those in the trees of their DNA relatives.

  1. Robert C. Hathaway

    I am 80 years old this Dec. And never really sure wher I came from, will a DNA test help me find out wher I came from.

    Thanks.

  2. When I was born,if your mother wasn’t married YOUR FATHERs name wasn’t on your birth record,All my life I WAS ‘colored;But looked white.I did a ‘DNA; found out I was 67%white.How do I get my records straight.IM 77 ,BUT I WOULD LIKE TO GET ALL RIGHT for my family .

  3. seham

    I did my dna test and I am so disappointed that my result is 100% middle east without any details about what is middle east since it’s so huge like saying you are from Europe!! . I think because the ancestry.com specified for ppl from the US and Europe so that’s why the details only include those two regions.
    Thank you

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