Genomics analysis software developed by computer scientists at Stanford can go back 20 generations and identify what continent or broad global region an individual's ancestors were from. The HAPAA software compares an individual to all those in the International HapMap database – a genetic record of 270 individuals of Western European, West African and East Asian ancestry - to see what distinct spans of genetic snippets, or haploblocks, they share in common.
The researchers tested the system's accuracy using individuals in the database and by synthesizing virtual people, essentially simulating mating for 20 generations among individuals in the database. An advance that improves HAPAA's accuracy is its more accurate modeling of individual variation. The Stanford computer scientists created an algorithm to compare the genetic information of the test individual to that of every individual in the database.
The HapMap database is small, and HAPAA now can only generate an ethnic profile in terms of these populations. Today's genome samples track about 500,000 markers, or common genetic differences, but there are about 10 million candidates. Most individuals have about 3 million such specific differences. As genomics technology improves, so will HAPAA's ability to infer ancestry from the data.
