英国牛津大学Gil McVean研究团队近日取得一项新成果。经过不懈努力，他们绘制了现代和古代基因组的统一谱系。相关论文发表在2022年2月25日出版的《科学》杂志上。

研究人员用非参数方法解决了现代人与祖先的关系问题，使研究人员能够推断出现代和古代人类的统一家谱。这种对多个数据集的紧凑表征解决了丢失和错误数据的难题，并使用古老样本来约束和确定关系。研究人员用该方法辨别了个体和群体之间的关系并展示了识别古代样本后代的能力。最后，研究人员研发了一个简单的祖先地理位置非参数估计器，它囊括了人类历史上的关键事件。

据介绍，来自世界各地的现代和古代基因组测序彻底改变了对人类历史和进化的理解。然而，如何利用人类基因组变异整体数据来更好的表征祖先关系仍未得以解决。

附：英文原文

Title: A unified genealogy of modern and ancient genomes

Author: Anthony Wilder Wohns, Yan Wong, Ben Jeffery, Ali Akbari, Swapan Mallick, Ron Pinhasi, Nick Patterson, David Reich, Jerome Kelleher, Gil McVean

Issue&Volume: 2022-02-25

Abstract: The sequencing of modern and ancient genomes from around the world has revolutionized our understanding of human history and evolution. However, the problem of how best to characterize ancestral relationships from the totality of human genomic variation remains unsolved. Here, we address this challenge with nonparametric methods that enable us to infer a unified genealogy of modern and ancient humans. This compact representation of multiple datasets explores the challenges of missing and erroneous data and uses ancient samples to constrain and date relationships. We demonstrate the power of the method to recover relationships between individuals and populations as well as to identify descendants of ancient samples. Finally, we introduce a simple nonparametric estimator of the geographical location of ancestors that recapitulates key events in human history.

DOI: abi8264

Source: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi8264