In many populations, ancestry varies at different genomic regions; the ability to infer local ancestry is important for applications ranging from personalized medicine to studying the history of human populations. However, current computational methods for local ancestry inference are slow and can only detect ancestry at the continental level. This study presents a new and faster approach, which infers ancestry at a finer level: the authors used it to show that African Americans have low levels of Native American ancestry.
References
Maples, B. K. et al. RFMix: a discriminative modeling approach for rapid and robust local ancestry inference. Am. J. Hum. Genet. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2013.06.020 (2013)
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Local ancestry inference gets faster and better. Nat Rev Genet 14, 599 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg3571
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg3571