
Find Yourself: Tracing Human Origins Using DNA
Monday, April 5 - Friday, April 16, 2021 EDT
Online Course
Presented By
The New York Academy of Sciences


Have you ever wondered how an at-home ancestry test works? You may be one, or know one, of the over 26 million people who have taken this test. You order a kit online, spit in a tube, send the tube with your cheek cells to a genetic ancestry testing company, and wait for your results: what will you find (or not)? In this workshop, you will learn what genetic ancestry is and how to determine an individual's ancestral origins using two types of genetic tests: autosomal and mitochondrial DNA tests. The autosomal DNA test uses over 600,000 sites from the 22 pairs of chromosomes that we inherit from both parents to give an overall picture of an individual. The mitochondrial DNA test uses the mitochondrial DNA that is only inherited from our mothers to identify an individual's ancient maternal lineage.
In this workshop, we will download publicly available genetic data from 52 worldwide populations from the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP), classify the autosomal and mitochondrial DNA ancestry of >1,000 individuals using UNIX-based software programs (ADMIXTURE and HaploGrep2), and perform basic statistics and visualize the genetic ancestry data using R. We will also discuss the importance of genetic ancestry in understanding our ancient origins and in health and disease. We will also discuss how to collect and preserve DNA, how to sequence DNA, how to study and analyze sequence data, and how to read a scientific paper. You will learn basic principles in biology, genetics, programming, and statistics. After this workshop, you can use these quantitative skills in any field or topic to analyze and visualize your own datasets.
$495/student for this two-week camp
Week 1: April 5-9
Week 2: April 12-16
Online via Zoom. Two hours of in-person teaching time with intermittent group breakout sections Monday through Friday. Students will be assigned work outside of class to be completed independently and in small groups.
Daily Monday through Friday, 4:00-6:00PM EST
Dr. Kevin Magnaye is a human geneticist who has made contributions in disease and population genetics. He received undergraduate degrees in Biology and Anthropology at the University of Washington (UW) Seattle and a PhD in Human Genetics at the University of Chicago. He served as a Ruth L. Kirschstein Predoctoral Fellow and received a Graduate Global Impact Scholarship to lead a research study on the genetics of infection at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France. He is passionate about basic and translational science as well as outreach and mentorship. He has served as a coordinator for the UW Genomics for Minorities Project and as an instructor for high school and undergraduate students in Phoenix, Arizona and in Oaxaca, Mexico as part of the Clubes de Ciencia initiative.
Objectives
- Learn principles in genetics, programming, and statistics used to explore our origins.
- Learn the importance of genetic ancestry in direct-to-consumer genetic testing, in understanding human origins and migrations, and in health and disease.
- Students will learn how to access and analyze genetic data from the Human Genome Diversity Project.
Outcomes
- Students will master basic principles in genetics, programming, and statistics used to explore our origins.
- Students will understand the importance of genetic ancestry in direct-to-consumer genetic testing, in understanding ancient human origins and migrations, and in health and disease.
- Students will analyze autosomal and mitochondrial genetic data from Human Genome Diversity Project individuals using PLINK, ADMIXTURE, and HaploGrep2 and generate summary statistics and plots using R.
Images and Documents
Ancestry Paper: A scientific paper that I contributed to as an undergraduate student at the University of Washington where I conducted studies that motivated this workshop. We will be using the same populations and performing similar analyses as those described in this research paper.
I am pictured at age 18 with my mentor at the time. I used molecular biology approaches to determine mtDNA haplogroups for the same individuals we will examine in this workshop.
An example of the results of gel electrophoresis that was used to test individuals for a specific
A plot that is used to show autosomal DNA ancestry (continental proportions) of all 52 populations from the Human Genome Diversity Project. We will construct a similar plot in this workshop.
A map showing ancient migration routes of our female ancestors, as indicated by mitochondrial haplogroups (alphabetical letters).