DNAprint Genomics (DNAG)

[mingwan0]

OK, fair enough. DNAP indeed does have to convince the scientific community of the validity of their work. Given that Mark Shriver has a vested interest in the product(s) we can to some extent discount his validation. Such validation extends beyond ABD of course, and beyond the academic community for forensics. To date people like Mirhashemi and Arena, USF, NYU, Moffitt, Chakraborty, Rao, San Diego Police Department, National Center for Forensic Science, multiple other US Police Departments (including Louisiana), Scotland Yard, and the Metropolitan Police have apparently validated the product. I would like to see more papers from the company in journals and some of the patents issued, but things don't look too bad at the moment.

Don't get me started on Kidd and O'Brien (and don't even think of mentioning Goldstein).

We need to bear in mind that DNAP is a small and young company. They have some experience of people trying to rip off their intellectual property, and it is understandable that they are a bit cagey in this regard. Tony Frudakis said on RootsWeb back in January that communication with genealogists had been a problem and had been and would continue to be addressed (presumably the same applies to communication to shareholders - there seems to have been an order of magnitude more communication with RootsWeb posters than there has with the latter). I am sure that DNAP does and will listen to those members of their customer and investor base who have knowledge of these subjects.

I have been trying to have a look at who has been working on timing of admixture events, and there is not a lot in the literature that I can see. It would be nice to get some more information on this. Here is some background for anyone interested:

http://www.garlandscience.com/heg/pdf/ch12.pdf (the best overview)

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/99/17/11008 (This one has unique-event polymorphisms - UEPs)

http://hpgl.stanford.edu/publications/GR_1997_v7_p996.pdf

http://www.qmw.ac.uk/~ugbt112/ecopop/Goldstein_and_Chikhi_Amended_26_02_02.doc

http://www.genetics.org/cgi/content/full/152/3/1079

http://pritch.bsd.uchicago.edu/publications/FalushEtAl03_Genetics.pdf

I agree that there are some potential issues with ABD 3.0. I previously pointed out the lack of an agreed taxonomy and nomenclature. This is going to create problems I suspect. Hopefully we will see some accompanying papers about this version of the product when it arrives.