Oxford Creates Largest Human Family Tree With 27M Ancestors

Researchers from the University of Oxford's Big Data Institute have taken a major step towards mapping the entirety of genetic relationships among humans: a single genealogy that traces the ancestry of all of us, ScienceDaily reported.

Photo Insert: The set of trees is known as a "tree sequence" or "ancestral recombination graph."

The past two decades have seen extraordinary advancements in human genetic research, generating genomic data for hundreds of thousands of individuals, including from thousands of prehistoric people.

This raises the exciting possibility of tracing the origins of human genetic diversity to produce a complete map of how individuals across the world are related to each other.

However, it needed to combine genome sequences from many databases and develop algorithms to handle data of this size. A new method published in Science by researchers from the University of Oxford's Big Data Institute can easily combine data from multiple sources and scale to accommodate millions of genome sequences.

Dr. Yan Wong, an evolutionary geneticist at the Big Data Institute, and one of the principal authors, explained: "We have basically built a huge family tree, a genealogy for all of humanity that models as exactly as we can the history that generated all the genetic variation we find in humans today. This genealogy allows us to see how every person's genetic sequence relates to every other, along all the points of the genome."

Since individual genomic regions are only inherited from one parent, either the mother or the father, the ancestry of each point on the genome can be thought of as a tree.

The set of trees, known as a "tree sequence" or "ancestral recombination graph," links genetic regions back through time to ancestors where the genetic variation first appeared.

Lead author Dr. Anthony Wilder Wohns, who undertook the research as part of his Ph.D. at the Big Data Institute and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, said: "Essentially, we are reconstructing the genomes of our ancestors and using them to form a vast network of relationships. We can then estimate when and where these ancestors lived. The power of our approach is that it makes very few assumptions about the underlying data and can also include both modern and ancient DNA samples."

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