An international team of researchers have developed a groundbreaking new technique in genetics that can help people learn where their DNA was formed more than a thousand years ago. The genetic "sat nav" can be used to determine where a person's ancestors resided in the past.
The revolutionary new technique was developed by a team led by geneticists from the University of Sheffield in the UK. The tool has been aptly named the Geographic Population Structure tool or GPS for short. As the name somewhat suggests, the tool also works in a manner similar to the GPS systems used in smartphones and cars. Instead of pinpointing the location of the nearest coffee shop or mapping a convenient route home however, the genetic tool can pinpoint the location were an individual's ancestors would have lived over a millennia in the past. The tool was developed by University of Sheffield geneticist Eran Elhaik and University of Southern California computational biologist Tatiana Tatarinova.
"If we think of our world as being made up of different colours of soup - representing different populations - it is easy to visualise how genetic admixture occurs," said Elhaik. "If a population from the blue soup region mixes with a population from the red soup region their offspring would appear as a purple soup."
While this type of technology has existed for a while now, the new technique developed by Elhaik and Tatarinova is far more accurate. Previous techniques could determine where DNA was formed within 435 miles. In certain areas of the world, this distance could put one or two countries between one location and another location more than 400 miles away.
The technique relies on the analysis of genetic admixture, which occurs when genetic material from two previously separated populations start to intermingle. Admixture events represent a point in time when new gene pools are created. For individuals alive today, their genetic materials were created during genetic admixture events in the past. Over the millennia, scientists have determined that large scale genetic admixture events often coincide with significant events throughout history. This includes the Mongol invasion or the spread of the Vikings throughout Europe.
"The more genetic admixture that takes place, the more different colours of soup are introduced which makes it increasingly difficult to locate your DNA's ancestry using traditional tools like Spatial Ancestry analysis (SPA) which has an accuracy level of less than two per cent," Elhaim said.
With the new technique, the researchers say that they can pinpoint the location of where a person's ancestors lived to within the right island or village with a success rate of 98 percent. The team published its findings in the online journal Nature Communications.
