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Human Genome but Interesting Implications

lillith September 06, 2012 September 06, 2012

Forums

I saw this and thought of you lot :grin: [url]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-19202141[/url] They have released the results of a huge study on the human genome - some interesting suggestions [quote] They have found 80% of our genome is performing a specific function...up to now, most attention has been focused on protein-coding genes.... just 2% of the genome...The Encode team analysed the vast area ... called "junk DNA" because it seemed to have little function and was poorly understood. Dr Ewan Birney, ... "The term junk DNA must now be junked..."It's clear from this research that a far bigger part of the genome is biologically active than was previously thought."[/quote] May well suggest (as some of our forum members have theorised) that other mammals are likely to be similar - perhaps we will find the answers to min/max expression, depth of colour and shade somewhere in the 'Junk' DNA in the future.

colorfan Sun, 10/14/2012 - 23:15

I have a question on human dna I am hoping someone here can help with.
I expect some head shaking or falling on floor laughing at my lack of knowledge.

Apparently one can have their blood typed to determine ethnicity. So someone who has had this done is 43% x.
This was a surprise since the family had always thought grandpa came from somewhere else.
Is the transfer of dna like some color genes? Some could be passed, some not. So we can get a chestnut from a bay.
I know we get 23 chromosomes from each parent so do the chromosones have a set of dna so out of a pair of chromosones one has france/england markers one has france/belgium markers so if both parents contributed chromosones with belgium on them the percentage of belgium markers would be higher.

TIA

Third Peppermint Tue, 10/16/2012 - 05:53

I think I know what you're asking and it's very complicated. As far as I know for humans they can look at the Y chromosome and the mitochondrial DNA to get an idea of which haplogroup they're from. Haplogroups are pretty ancient, so they can give you a basic idea of where your distant ancestors are from but nothing really close enough for countries. The way i've seen them do countries is to compare someone's DNA to people that appear to have a long family history of being in one area, but it's not really all that accurate since you need to count on word of mouth (very inaccurate.)

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that while you might be able to get an idea of where your ancestors are from it's not going to be that accurate. Humans just moved around way too much for us to be able to say "Oh, your ancestors are from Spain, Italy, and Bhutan most recently."

I have had both done and they did turn out surprisingly accurate, but there definitely were matches with people from weird countries so I have no clue how they got in there. Maybe your grandpa is closely related to a family from the other country or his ancestors moved for a better life. That would explain why he's from one place, but is most similar to people from another?