Archive for the 'Speculation' Category

My 23andMe data revealed a number of potentially worrying results: compared to what I was expecting, I turned out to be a hotbed of mild genetic disease. I visited my GP to discuss the results with him; he spent a short while staring at the reports, and then referred me to a clinical geneticist. I haven’t had the appointment at the time of writing this, so I will give a full report of the experience after I’ve had time to digest it. I’m not going into details about all this now, because I didn’t really want to open this new chapter of the Genomes Unzipped book talking about my potential or actual diseases – so instead, I’m going to talk about something entirely unrelated to disease, and related to my family, and our suspected histories.

I have worked on Y chromosome sequencing pretty extensively in the past, and the first thing I checked when I received my 23andMe data was my Y haplogroup. The Y chromosome is passed down exclusively from father to son, and thus provides information about one “edge” of my family tree (my father, my father’s father, my father’s father’s father, and so on). My haplogroup is N1, which is a predominantly Asian haplogroup, and is very rare in the UK. This isn’t actually a very strange result, though; my father’s father is Latvian, and the N1 haplogroup is not rare in the Baltic regions. In fact, the subgroup, N1c1, is more common in parts of Eastern Europe than it is in Asia.

Continue reading ‘A new family history’