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. 2020 Mar 9;16(3):e1008624.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1008624. eCollection 2020 Mar.

What is ancestry?

Iain Mathieson  1 , Aylwyn Scally  2
Affiliations

What is ancestry?

Iain Mathieson et al. PLoS Genet. .
No abstract available

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Genealogical and genetic ancestry.
A: The pedigree of a single individual. Circles indicate specific ancestors that could be used to define ancestry categories. B: At any single position in the diploid genome, genetic ancestry over the past N generations traces two paths (red and blue) through the, at most, 2N available. C: Genetic ancestry in the form of the ARG for a single individual. Combining genetic ancestry from different positions leads to a graph, incorporating all realized genetic ancestry paths, implicitly passing through points representing specific individuals. The ARG is contained within the structure of the pedigree, with nodes corresponding to ancestors in which there was a recombination or coalescence event, and edges or lines between them representing paths of descent (through other ancestors which are not represented) for particular segments of DNA. D: The ARG is usually used in the context of the merged ARGs of multiple individuals.
Fig 2
Fig 2. Statistical summaries of genetic data.
The most popular approaches range from approximate representations of the ARG (e.g. admixture graphs), to summaries of data with no direct relationship to genetic ancestry (e.g. PCA).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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