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Letter

Nature Genetics 40, 646–649 (1 May 2008) | doi:10.1038/ng.139

Interpreting principal component analyses of spatial population genetic variation

John Novembre & Matthew Stephens

Nearly 30 years ago, Cavalli-Sforza et al. pioneered the use of principal component analysis (PCA) in population genetics and used PCA to produce maps summarizing human genetic variation across continental regions.