- Improve the power of your association study
- Detect potential ethnic diversity leading to population stratification in your association study
- Avoid false-positives or failure to discover real associations due to undetected population structure
- Access a marker set highly effective for estimating the ancestry of individuals with respect to three major ethnical groups – African, Asian and Caucasian
- Receive deCODE’s extensive statistical expertise to help you determine the proportional ancestry of your study individuals based on their genotypes
deCODE has created a set of 32 microsatellite markers that are highly effective for estimating the ancestry of individuals with respect to three major geographic ancestral regions: Africa, East Asia and Europe. Using powerful statistical algorithms, we are able to use genotypes to infer the proportions of ancestry on an individual basis with great accuracy for the members of most human populations.
The core microsatellite marker set for distinguishing ancestry
deCODE’s ancestry marker set consists of 32 microsatellites, which were selected
on the basis of exhibiting large differences in allele frequency among
populations from Europe, East Asia and Africa.
Allele frequencies in different ethnic groups were determined on the basis of the 270 samples used in the HapMap project and were verified using larger samples of Icelanders and an in-house collection of Americans of European, African and Asian ancestry (figure 1). In total, the 32 microsatellites yield 250 alleles in our reference samples, thereof 173 alleles have a frequency >0.05 in at least one of the major continental groups.
From this set of alleles we define those as informative for determining ancestry when their absolute difference in frequency (D) is 0.35 between two of the three major continental groups. Table 1 shows the number of informative alleles for distinguishing ancestry from the three continental groups in the set of 32 microsatellite markers.
For more information, please contact genotyping@decode.com.
