In the name of the father: surnames and genetics
TL;DR: Recent studies involving Y-chromosomal haplotyping and surname analysis are promising and indicate that genealogists of the future could be turning to records written in DNA, as well as in paper archives, to solve their problems.
About: This article is published in Trends in Genetics.The article was published on 2001-06-01. It has received 191 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Patronymic surname.
Citations
More filters
Posted Content•
TL;DR: In this article, a preliminary investigation of surnames distributions as a measure of long run social mobility was carried out in England and the United States, and it was shown that persistent social classes have only emerged in societies like England and United States in recent years.
Abstract: This reports on a preliminary investigation of surnames distributions as a measure long run social mobility. In England this suggests two surprising claims. First, England, all the way from the heart of the Middle Ages in 1250 to at least 1860, was a society without persistent social classes. It was a world of social mobility, with no permanent over-class and under-class, a world of complete equal opportunity. There was, however, a gain from being in the upper class in any generation in the form of leaving more copies of your DNA permanently in later populations. Second, signs of persistent social classes have only emerged in societies like England and the United States in recent years. Instead of moving from a world of immobility and class rigidity to a world of equal opportunity, we have moved in the opposite direction.
2 citations
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors examined whether and how analysts' foreign ancestral origins would have an effect on analysts' earning forecasts in particular and ultimately on firms' information environment in general, and they found that firms followed by more analysts with foreign surnames tend to exhibit higher earnings forecast errors.
Abstract: PurposeThe purpose of this study is to examine whether and how analysts’ foreign ancestral origins would have an effect on analysts’ earning forecasts in particular and ultimately on firms’ information environment in general.Design/methodology/approachBy inferring analysts’ ancestral countries based on their surnames, this study empirically examines whether analysts’ ancestral countries affect their earnings forecast errors.FindingsUsing novel data on analysts’ foreign ancestral origins from more than 110 countries, this study finds that relative to analysts with common American surnames, analysts with common foreign surnames tend to have higher earnings forecast errors. The positive relation between analyst foreign surnames and earnings forecast errors is more likely to be observed for African-American analysts and analysts whose ancestry countries are geographically apart from the USA. In contrast, this study finds that when analysts’ foreign countries of ancestry are aligned with that of the CEOs, analysts exhibit lower earnings forecast errors relative to analysts with common American surnames. More importantly, the results show that firms followed by more analysts with foreign surnames tend to exhibit higher earnings forecast errors.Originality/valueTaken together, findings of this study are consistent with the conjecture that geographical, social and ethnical proximity between managers and analysts affect firms’ information environment. Therefore, this study contributes to the determinants of analysts’ earnings forecast errors and adds to the literature on firms’ information environment.
2 citations
01 Apr 2004
TL;DR: Over 200 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and ∼40 short tandem repeats (STRs) make the Y chromosome the most informative haplotyping system in the genome, leading to interest in predicting population-of-origin.
Abstract: Over 200 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and ∼40 short tandem repeats (STRs) make the Y chromosome the most informative haplotyping system in the genome. The SNPs define haplogroups forming a unique phylogeny, and with high geographical differentiation, leading to interest in predicting population-of-origin. Data on admixed populations suggest that such predictions may often be misleading. Studies of relationships between surnames and Y haplotypes suggest that surname prediction from DNA will not be reliable.
2 citations
Cites background from "In the name of the father: surnames..."
...However, in reality, there are a several perturbing influences: some names had more than one founder (about 25 generations ago in England); non-paternities and adoptions have introduced other lineages; and people sometimes change their surnames [7]....
[...]
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explored the relationships among Sardinian populations by means of a spatial analysis of surnames in five villages in the historical-geographical zone of Barbagia di Belvi, a mountainous area traditionally devoted to sheep-herding and the point of departure of transhumance toward lowland areas.
Abstract: We explored the relationships among Sardinian populations by means of a spatial analysis of surnames in five villages in the historical–geographical zone of Barbagia di Belvi, a mountainous area traditionally devoted to sheep-herding and the point of departure of transhumance toward lowland areas. We collected the surnames of 19th century Sardinian populations through the Status Animarum (parish censuses). The structures of past populations were compared with current structures based on surnames reported in telephone directories. The lowland villages studied have been the final destination of transhumance and have a different historical, cultural and economic background. The spread of surnames in Sardinia may have occurred also by means of transhumance which took place every year along precise routes from the pastoral mountain zones to the agricultural plains. The standardized index of Chen and Cavalli-Sforza was used to calculate relationships among the five villages of Barbagia di Belvi (Aritzo, Belvi, Desulo, Gadoni and Tonara). An application of non-metric multidimensional scaling to the isonymy matrices showed that the villages of Barbagia di Belvi form a group that have changed very little over time. Transhumance routes were studied by spatial autocorrelation (Moran’s I) applied to surnames. The results suggest that there has been an appreciable admixture between the Sardinian populations of the mountain villages of the central areas and the populations of southern lowland villages. Riassunto Nel presente lavoro sono state esaminate le relazioni tra le popolazioni sarde attraverso l’analisi dei cognomi in cinque comuni della zona storico-geografica della Barbagia di Belvi (Aritzo, Belvi, Desulo, Gadoni e Tonara), area montuosa tradizionalmente dedita all'allevamento delle pecore e punto di partenza della transumanza verso zone di pianura. I cognomi della popolazione sono stati rilevati dai registri parrocchiali (Status Animarum) del XIX secolo. La struttura cognominale di questo periodo e stata confrontata con quella attuale, ricavata dallo studio dei cognomi riportati negli elenchi telefonici, dei comuni di pianura, transito e destinazione finale della transumanza, che hanno un differente fondo storico, culturale ed economico. La diffusione dei cognomi in Sardegna, infatti, potrebbe essere avvenuta anche attraverso la transumanza, che si verifica ogni anno lungo percorsi precisi dalle zone montane pastorali alle pianure dedite all’agricoltura. E stato utilizzato l'indice standardizzato di Chen e Cavalli-Sforza per calcolare le relazioni tra i cinque comuni della Barbagia di Belvi. L'applicazione del non-metric multidimensional scaling alle matrici di isonimia ha mostrato che questi comuni formano un gruppo che e cambiato molto poco nel tempo. Le direttrici di transumanza sono state studiate mediante la spatial autocorrelation (Moran's I) applicata ai cognomi. I risultati suggeriscono che vi e stata un'apprezzabile commistione tra le popolazioni sarde dei comuni di montagna delle aree centrali e quelle dei comuni della pianura meridionale.
2 citations
01 Jan 2014
TL;DR: A brief history of naming is reviewed in this paper, drawing from linguistic, historic and anthropological literatures, and illustrated with examples drawn from different countries and time periods both for surnames and forenames.
Abstract: Language is an inherent human function and naming is just one of its multiple and inevitable consequences. Through naming we have defined ourselves through millennia, in ways that have involuntarily bounded human groups up through time and space. A brief history of naming is reviewed in this chapter, drawing from linguistic, historic and anthropological literatures, and illustrated with examples drawn from different countries and time periods both for surnames and forenames. The chapter introduces the idea that naming practices are not at all random, but indeed reflect the social norms and cultural customs of the group, and thus follow distinct geographical and cultural patterns. Although such naming patterns have been studied widely for particular groups of names, languages, religions or world regions, few previous attempts have been made to understand their socio-cultural effect on population structure at large, regardless of their individual historical or linguistic idiosyncrasies. The chapter concludes with an early controversial example of how people’s name origins have been historically used to subdivide contemporary populations into ethnic groups: the use of historical surnames origins to determine the US immigration policy in the first half of the twentieth century.
2 citations
References
More filters
TL;DR: The results of an international collaboration to produce and make freely available a draft sequence of the human genome are reported and an initial analysis is presented, describing some of the insights that can be gleaned from the sequence.
Abstract: The human genome holds an extraordinary trove of information about human development, physiology, medicine and evolution. Here we report the results of an international collaboration to produce and make freely available a draft sequence of the human genome. We also present an initial analysis of the data, describing some of the insights that can be gleaned from the sequence.
22,269 citations
TL;DR: Comparative genomic analysis indicates vertebrate expansions of genes associated with neuronal function, with tissue-specific developmental regulation, and with the hemostasis and immune systems are indicated.
Abstract: A 2.91-billion base pair (bp) consensus sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome was generated by the whole-genome shotgun sequencing method. The 14.8-billion bp DNA sequence was generated over 9 months from 27,271,853 high-quality sequence reads (5.11-fold coverage of the genome) from both ends of plasmid clones made from the DNA of five individuals. Two assembly strategies-a whole-genome assembly and a regional chromosome assembly-were used, each combining sequence data from Celera and the publicly funded genome effort. The public data were shredded into 550-bp segments to create a 2.9-fold coverage of those genome regions that had been sequenced, without including biases inherent in the cloning and assembly procedure used by the publicly funded group. This brought the effective coverage in the assemblies to eightfold, reducing the number and size of gaps in the final assembly over what would be obtained with 5.11-fold coverage. The two assembly strategies yielded very similar results that largely agree with independent mapping data. The assemblies effectively cover the euchromatic regions of the human chromosomes. More than 90% of the genome is in scaffold assemblies of 100,000 bp or more, and 25% of the genome is in scaffolds of 10 million bp or larger. Analysis of the genome sequence revealed 26,588 protein-encoding transcripts for which there was strong corroborating evidence and an additional approximately 12,000 computationally derived genes with mouse matches or other weak supporting evidence. Although gene-dense clusters are obvious, almost half the genes are dispersed in low G+C sequence separated by large tracts of apparently noncoding sequence. Only 1.1% of the genome is spanned by exons, whereas 24% is in introns, with 75% of the genome being intergenic DNA. Duplications of segmental blocks, ranging in size up to chromosomal lengths, are abundant throughout the genome and reveal a complex evolutionary history. Comparative genomic analysis indicates vertebrate expansions of genes associated with neuronal function, with tissue-specific developmental regulation, and with the hemostasis and immune systems. DNA sequence comparisons between the consensus sequence and publicly funded genome data provided locations of 2.1 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). A random pair of human haploid genomes differed at a rate of 1 bp per 1250 on average, but there was marked heterogeneity in the level of polymorphism across the genome. Less than 1% of all SNPs resulted in variation in proteins, but the task of determining which SNPs have functional consequences remains an open challenge.
12,098 citations
TL;DR: A method for constructing networks from recombination-free population data that combines features of Kruskal's algorithm for finding minimum spanning trees by favoring short connections, and Farris's maximum-parsimony (MP) heuristic algorithm, which sequentially adds new vertices called "median vectors", except that the MJ method does not resolve ties.
Abstract: Reconstructing phylogenies from intraspecific data (such as human mitochondrial DNA variation) is often a challenging task because of large sample sizes and small genetic distances between individuals. The resulting multitude of plausible trees is best expressed by a network which displays alternative potential evolutionary paths in the form of cycles. We present a method ("median joining" [MJ]) for constructing networks from recombination-free population data that combines features of Kruskal's algorithm for finding minimum spanning trees by favoring short connections, and Farris's maximum-parsimony (MP) heuristic algorithm, which sequentially adds new vertices called "median vectors", except that our MJ method does not resolve ties. The MJ method is hence closely related to the earlier approach of Foulds, Hendy, and Penny for estimating MP trees but can be adjusted to the level of homoplasy by setting a parameter epsilon. Unlike our earlier reduced median (RM) network method, MJ is applicable to multistate characters (e.g., amino acid sequences). An additional feature is the speed of the implemented algorithm: a sample of 800 worldwide mtDNA hypervariable segment I sequences requires less than 3 h on a Pentium 120 PC. The MJ method is demonstrated on a Tibetan mitochondrial DNA RFLP data set.
9,937 citations
TL;DR: A new algorithm for finding tandem repeats which works without the need to specify either the pattern or pattern size is presented and its ability to detect tandem repeats that have undergone extensive mutational change is demonstrated.
Abstract: A tandem repeat in DNA is two or more contiguous, approximate copies of a pattern of nucleotides. Tandem repeats have been shown to cause human disease, may play a variety of regulatory and evolutionary roles and are important laboratory and analytic tools. Extensive knowledge about pattern size, copy number, mutational history, etc. for tandem repeats has been limited by the inability to easily detect them in genomic sequence data. In this paper, we present a new algorithm for finding tandem repeats which works without the need to specify either the pattern or pattern size. We model tandem repeats by percent identity and frequency of indels between adjacent pattern copies and use statistically based recognition criteria. We demonstrate the algorithm’s speed and its ability to detect tandem repeats that have undergone extensive mutational change by analyzing four sequences: the human frataxin gene, the human β T cell receptor locus sequence and two yeast chromosomes. These sequences range in size from 3 kb up to 700 kb. A World Wide Web server interface at c3.biomath.mssm.edu/trf.html has been established for automated use of the program.
6,577 citations
TL;DR: This book aims to provide a history of Chinese modern art from 17th Century to the present day through the lens of 20th Century critics, practitioners, journalists, and mediaeval and modern-day critics.
Abstract: J. Craig Venter,* Mark D. Adams, Eugene W. Myers, Peter W. Li, Richard J. Mural, Granger G. Sutton, Hamilton O. Smith, Mark Yandell, Cheryl A. Evans, Robert A. Holt, Jeannine D. Gocayne, Peter Amanatides, Richard M. Ballew, Daniel H. Huson, Jennifer Russo Wortman, Qing Zhang, Chinnappa D. Kodira, Xiangqun H. Zheng, Lin Chen, Marian Skupski, Gangadharan Subramanian, Paul D. Thomas, Jinghui Zhang, George L. Gabor Miklos, Catherine Nelson, Samuel Broder, Andrew G. Clark, Joe Nadeau, Victor A. McKusick, Norton Zinder, Arnold J. Levine, Richard J. Roberts, Mel Simon, Carolyn Slayman, Michael Hunkapiller, Randall Bolanos, Arthur Delcher, Ian Dew, Daniel Fasulo, Michael Flanigan, Liliana Florea, Aaron Halpern, Sridhar Hannenhalli, Saul Kravitz, Samuel Levy, Clark Mobarry, Knut Reinert, Karin Remington, Jane Abu-Threideh, Ellen Beasley, Kendra Biddick, Vivien Bonazzi, Rhonda Brandon, Michele Cargill, Ishwar Chandramouliswaran, Rosane Charlab, Kabir Chaturvedi, Zuoming Deng, Valentina Di Francesco, Patrick Dunn, Karen Eilbeck, Carlos Evangelista, Andrei E. Gabrielian, Weiniu Gan, Wangmao Ge, Fangcheng Gong, Zhiping Gu, Ping Guan, Thomas J. Heiman, Maureen E. Higgins, Rui-Ru Ji, Zhaoxi Ke, Karen A. Ketchum, Zhongwu Lai, Yiding Lei, Zhenya Li, Jiayin Li, Yong Liang, Xiaoying Lin, Fu Lu, Gennady V. Merkulov, Natalia Milshina, Helen M. Moore, Ashwinikumar K Naik, Vaibhav A. Narayan, Beena Neelam, Deborah Nusskern, Douglas B. Rusch, Steven Salzberg, Wei Shao, Bixiong Shue, Jingtao Sun, Zhen Yuan Wang, Aihui Wang, Xin Wang, Jian Wang, Ming-Hui Wei, Ron Wides, Chunlin Xiao, Chunhua Yan, Alison Yao, Jane Ye, Ming Zhan, Weiqing Zhang, Hongyu Zhang, Qi Zhao, Liansheng Zheng, Fei Zhong, Wenyan Zhong, Shiaoping C. Zhu, Shaying Zhao, Dennis Gilbert, Suzanna Baumhueter, Gene Spier, Christine Carter, Anibal Cravchik, Trevor Woodage, Feroze Ali, Huijin An, Aderonke Awe, Danita Baldwin, Holly Baden, Mary Barnstead, Ian Barrow, Karen Beeson, Dana Busam, Amy Carver, Angela Center, Ming Lai Cheng, Liz Curry, Steve Danaher, Lionel Davenport, Raymond Desilets, Susanne Dietz, Kristina Dodson, Lisa Doup, Steven Ferriera, Neha Garg, Andres Gluecksmann, Brit Hart, Jason Haynes, Charles Haynes, Cheryl Heiner, Suzanne Hladun, Damon Hostin, Jarrett Houck, Timothy Howland, Chinyere Ibegwam, Jeffery Johnson, Francis Kalush, Lesley Kline, Shashi Koduru, Amy Love, Felecia Mann, David May, Steven McCawley, Tina McIntosh, Ivy McMullen, Mee Moy, Linda Moy, Brian Murphy, Keith Nelson, Cynthia Pfannkoch, Eric Pratts, Vinita Puri, Hina Qureshi, Matthew Reardon, Robert Rodriguez, Yu-Hui Rogers, Deanna Romblad, Bob Ruhfel, Richard Scott, Cynthia Sitter, Michelle Smallwood, Erin Stewart, Renee Strong, Ellen Suh, Reginald Thomas, Ni Ni Tint, Sukyee Tse, Claire Vech, Gary Wang, Jeremy Wetter, Sherita Williams, Monica Williams, Sandra Windsor, Emily Winn-Deen, Keriellen Wolfe, Jayshree Zaveri, Karena Zaveri, Josep F. Abril, Roderic Guigó, Michael J. Campbell, Kimmen V. Sjolander, Brian Karlak, Anish Kejariwal, Huaiyu Mi, Betty Lazareva, Thomas Hatton, Apurva Narechania, Karen Diemer, Anushya Muruganujan, Nan Guo, Shinji Sato, Vineet Bafna, Sorin Istrail, Ross Lippert, Russell Schwartz, Brian Walenz, Shibu Yooseph, David Allen, Anand Basu, James Baxendale, Louis Blick, Marcelo Caminha, John Carnes-Stine, Parris Caulk, Yen-Hui Chiang, My Coyne, Carl Dahlke, Anne Deslattes Mays, Maria Dombroski, Michael Donnelly, Dale Ely, Shiva Esparham, Carl Fosler, Harold Gire, Stephen Glanowski, Kenneth Glasser, Anna Glodek, Mark Gorokhov, Ken Graham, Barry Gropman, Michael Harris, Jeremy Heil, Scott Henderson, Jeffrey Hoover, Donald Jennings, Catherine Jordan, James Jordan, John Kasha, Leonid Kagan, Cheryl Kraft, Alexander Levitsky, Mark Lewis, Xiangjun Liu, John Lopez, Daniel Ma, William Majoros, Joe McDaniel, Sean Murphy, Matthew Newman, Trung Nguyen, Ngoc Nguyen, Marc Nodell, Sue Pan, Jim Peck, Marshall Peterson, William Rowe, Robert Sanders, John Scott, Michael Simpson, Thomas Smith, Arlan Sprague, Timothy Stockwell, Russell Turner, Eli Venter, Mei Wang, Meiyuan Wen, David Wu, Mitchell Wu, Ashley Xia, Ali Zandieh, Xiaohong Zhu T H E H U M A N G E N O M E
5,205 citations