European Genetics and Anthropology has a neat little tutorial that may be of interest for genetic hobbyists: it provides instructions on how to run the program STRUCTURE on your own genetic data generated by a personal genomics company such as 23andMe or deCODEme.
STRUCTURE is an extremely popular tool among researchers working in population genetics, which allows you to generate plots showing estimates of the proportion of an individual's genome belonging to different population clusters.
The tutorial on the blog shows you how to run your analysis using a subset of just 125 markers selected from your genetic data. That's enough to get a sense of what's going on, but of course having access to more than 500,000 markers from a genome scan theoretically allows you to perform a more powerful analysis using a much larger set of markers (and comparing to, say, the freely available SNP data from the Human Genome Diversity Panel).
It's great to see tools developed by academia being democratised by personal genomics hobbyists. One major benefit: if your personal genomics company does go bankrupt, so long as you've downloaded your data you can still analyse your genetic ancestry...
More like this
The world of genomics is changing. It was initially about sequencing the genome a single representative individual from a particular species.
...that is, if you still think that a genome sequence tells all secrets about someone's success in science etc. ;-)
What happens when I mention a paper describing two more Drosophila genomes?
Genome size can be measured in a variety of ways. Classically, the haploid content of a genome was measured in picograms and represented as the C-value.