December 19, 2008
Since 23andWe debuted in May, we've asked our customers about all sorts of things: their hair color, earwax consistency, whether they tend to look on life's bright side. Sometimes people have been surprised to learn that something like your susceptibility to motion sickness — or even which way the hair [...]
December 1, 2008
People sometimes think of ancestry as the "fun" part of the 23andMe Personal Genome Service™, an intriguing glimpse at the past that is completely unrelated to our more serious Health and Traits features. But a new paper shows how ancestry can actually reveal quite a bit about the genetics of disease. In [...]
November 17, 2008
Because their ancestors often were slaves during the 18th and 19th centuries, and therefore usually lacked birth or death certificates, it is very difficult for African American genealogists to trace their ancestors further than a few generations. Even when they can trace their ancestry to the slavery era, it [...]
November 14, 2008
The American Society for Human Genetics (ASHG) has released a statement outlining a set of recommendations for genetic ancestry testing. At a press briefing on Thursday, members of the ASHG Ancestry Testing Task Force Committee discussed two main themes: the need for clear communication about the [...]
August 25, 2008
23andMe (in the form of Serge Saxonov and me, Brian Naughton) will be at the 7th Annual International Conference on Computational Systems Bioinformatics at Stanford this Tuesday. We will be giving a tutorial on some of the more technical and scientific aspects of 23andme's service. It's not all glitz and [...]
August 13, 2008
By Chris Gignoux and Mike Macpherson It should be no surprise that in general, we are more genetically similar to our neighbors than to people living far away. The reason is fairly simple — until recently in human history it was fairly rare for people from widely separated geographic regions to even meet, [...]
August 7, 2008
(Ed: Newer research suggests that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals did in fact interbreed. On average, two to four percent of DNA in present-day humans who trace their ancestry from Europe or Asia comes from our Neanderthal cousins. 23andMe customers can check out their own Neanderthal ancestry here! -- [...]
July 25, 2008
This guest post is by Roy King, who is a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University and a research colleague of Stanford geneticist and 23andMe scientific adviser Peter Underhill. Roy and Peter have been using genetics to trace the spread of agriculture from the Near East to Europe. The question of [...]
July 10, 2008
You’ve always known that you have your dad’s curly hair, your mother’s eyes, and your grandmother’s coloring. But now that you’ve got your data back from 23andMe, you find yourself wondering whose side of the family the wet ear wax comes from (everyone denies having it), as well as whom to thank for [...]
June 27, 2008
This month I had the opportunity to go to the Society of Molecular Biology and Evolution conference in the striking city of Barcelona. This is the premiere conference for geneticists studying evolution in everything from bacteria to fruit flies, weeds, worms and our favorite model organism, humans! This is a [...]
