Highlights from the American Society of Human Genetics annual meeting
A collection of reports from the conference, held November 6-10 in San Francisco
Iceman’s Sardinian ties explained
When the genetic makeup of the 5,300-year-old mummy known as Ötzi was revealed earlier this year, scientists were surprised that his DNA suggests his modern-day relatives live in Sardinia instead of near the border of Austria and Italy where his frozen corpse was found. Analyses of DNA from present-day Europeans and remains of five other ancient people suggest that the Iceman wasn’t just a tourist from Sardinia. Instead he was probably part of a wave of migration of farmers into Europe, Martin Sikora of Stanford University reported November 8. Ötzi shares a more similar genetic makeup with a 5,000-year-old Swedish farmer and a 2,500-year-old Bulgarian than he does with hunter-gatherers from Sweden and the Iberian peninsula. The finding indicates that the spread of agriculture involved the people too, not just ideas, Sikora said.
DNA fingerprinting may point to innocent relatives
DNA testing has been used to pinpoint or rule out suspects in crimes. But a statistical test used to determine the solidity of a partial match between a crime scene sample and a genetic profile in a DNA database may be on shaky ground, Rori Rohlfs, a statistical geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, reported November 8. The test, known as the Balding-Nichols model, underestimates how often coincidental matches might indicate a crime was committed by a relative of someone in the database when the actual perpetrator is unrelated. That is a problem because a few states, including California, allow law enforcement officials to investigate relatives of people in criminal databases if DNA fingerprints detect a partial match with a crime scene sample. Faulty statistics could lead to innocent people being investigated for crimes, Rohlfs said.