DNAprint Genomics (DNAG)

[mingwan0]

A couple of observations about the issues raised.

Since February Tony Frudakis has stopped contributing to RootsWeb and the subscriber "DNA Cousins" suggested that the DNAPrint thread be dropped as the discussion had raged there long enough. This seems to have created a bit of a void in terms of a venue for DNAP and ABD discussion by genealogists. This forum is not such a venue. It is for DNAP shareholders. I lurked on RootsWeb and had some email exchanges with some of the stalwarts there (admitting that I was a DNAP shareholder). I did not see fit to subscribe to RootsWeb and enter the fray because I am not a genealogist and did not wish to use their forum to de facto promote the company. By the same token we should not view IHUB (or RB) as a venue for a rehashing of the discussion that previously occured on RootsWeb IMO.

The history of the development of ABD and the issues/concerns raised are well known to those of us who have followed the debate(s) on RootsWeb. Some of those issues are valid and have been or (IMO) are being addressed by the company. The size and diversity of the population samples used to develop the test is IMO such a valid issue. I have previously highlighted where DNAP and it's academic partners are sourcing DNA samples from different populations (not just for ABD) e.g. the Coriell Institute. You can easily see who is working on which populations (especially NAM tribes). We are all interested in seeing the intra-continental subdivisions that will be used in version 3.0 and which population samples they have used. You can learn something about the markers that Mark Shriver and his colleagues have been working with here:

http://146.186.95.23/biolab/voyage/psa.html

The science has been peer reviewed and published in an academic journal:

Frudakis T, Venkateswarlu K, Thomas MJ, Gaskin Z, Ginjupalli S, Gunturi S, Ponnuswamy V, Natarajan S, Nachimuthu PK. A classifier for the SNP-based inference of ancestry. J Forensic Sci. 2003 Jul;48(4):771-82.

Tony Frudakis and Mark Shriver has been asked by an academic publisher to write a textbook on the subject.

There is no comparable test (and I do not think there will be due to the potential for patent infringement).

DNAP are working on timing admixture events (they said this previously). This has big implications - not least for anthropology never mind genealogy.

The other area where this work has some application is in understanding human evolution:

Akey JM, Zhang G, Zhang K, Jin L, Shriver MD. Interrogating a high-density SNP map for signatures of natural selection. Genome Res. 2002 Dec;12(12):1805-14.

Center for Genome Information, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA.

Identifying genomic regions that have been targets of natural selection remains one of the most important and challenging areas of research in genetics. To this end, we report an analysis of 26,530 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with allele frequencies that were determined in three populations. Specifically, we calculated a measure of genetic differentiation, F(ST), for each locus and examined its distribution at the level of the genome, the chromosome, and individual genes. Through a variety of analyses, we have found statistically significant evidence supporting the hypothesis that selection has influenced extant patterns of human genetic variation. Importantly, by contrasting the F(ST) of individual SNPs to the empirical genome-wide distribution of F(ST), our results are not confounded by tenuous assumptions of population demographic history. Furthermore, we have identified 174 candidate genes with distribution of genetic variation that indicates that they have been targets of selection. Our work provides a first generation natural selection map of the human genome and provides compelling evidence that selection has shaped extant patterns of human genomic variation.

IMO if you understand which genes have been selected for you might be able to infer something about specific disease causes and processes. Perhaps the company has bigger fish to fry...