How a Genome Hacker Made a Family Tree With 13 Million Branches

What happens if you allow a genome hacker — a kind of computer scientist - turned - biologist — loose on the world ’s on-line family tree land site ? The macrocosm ’s boastful family tree diagram is what , which show up how over 13 million people are relate .

The work ofcomputational biologist Yaniv Erlich , which he presented at the American Society of Human Genetics annual meeting in Boston just recently , rolls together masses of data strip straight from online genealogy sites .

Historically , researchers have had to sift through moth-eaten sure-enough record for this form of data point ; assembling a tree of just a few thousand individual could take years . But Erlich scrape over 43 million public profiles — which always admit birth and decease dates , but also sometimes locations and images — off of the family tree websitegeni.com , then had his team assemble it into family trees .

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Some were as small as a thousand mortal ; one was as large as 13 million . That dwarfs the tree available to researchers in the past , which were hundred of thousands large at skilful , report Nature . Before you scream and shout about data right hand , it ’s all been anonymized to protect secrecy — but that does n’t make it any less useful . stretch out way back to the fifteenth century , the idea is to probe and analyze it for the commodity of science .

The challenge , though , is how to interrogate those tree diagram and wring out the secrets they hide . There ’s a lot of promise : their bare construction could tell us a flock about demographics and universe expansion , and if they can be linked to medical information or to DNA succession data then they could offer huge insight into the way we understand genetic endowment .

As ever , though , there are caveats . The trouble with most genealogy data is that it ’s self - report — and so not always reliable , peculiarly the far back you go . Still , that ’s the benefit of such a larger data correct : among the noise there may still be enough signal . For now , it ’s ill-defined just how utile the massive house tree will be — but it ’ll be exciting to find out . In the meantime , why not give it a bash yourself ? [ Nature ]

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