Today’s Topic Is About the Gene Analysis on People’s Ancestors
After the micro-research on genes after the 1950s, especially the work of Watson and Crick, which was awarded the Nobel Prize, humans began to know more about their genes’ structures and how genes express these information to control one’s external characteristics. With the development of the Human Genome Project, technology on determining individuals’ genes were more and more popular among enterprises. Some commercial gene analyses could use information in gene to tell you about your ancestors, in other words, where your ethnicity belongs to. From a biological point of view, after hundreds of generations, ancestors’ genes are barely traceable in offsprings’ genes. So how can commercial gene analyses tell you about your ancestors? It would compare your genes with averaged gene constituents in each region. The degree of similarity will be detected and it will conclude the percentage as the possibility of you having an ancestor in that region. But one inaccuracy is that this method uses modern people’s genes as ancestors’ genes in the same region. Another inaccuracy is caused by the incomplete database. Now regions in Africa and some islands in the Pacific Ocean are not included in the database, so one individual’s similarities in genes in these regions cannot be detected.
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