The Genographic Project Public Participation Mitochondrial DNA Database

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Department of Anthropology Papers
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genomic database
genotyping
haplotypes
mitochondrial DNA
mutation databases
phylogenetics
sequence databases
Anthropology
Genetics
Genetics and Genomics
Genomics
Molecular Genetics
Social and Behavioral Sciences
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Genographic Consortium
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The Genographic Project is studying the genetic signatures of ancient human migrations and creating an open-source research database. It allows members of the public to participate in a real-time anthropological genetics study by submitting personal samples for analysis and donating the genetic results to the database. We report our experience from the first 18 months of public participation in the Genographic Project, during which we have created the largest standardized human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) database ever collected, comprising 78,590 genotypes. Here, we detail our genotyping and quality assurance protocols including direct sequencing of the mtDNA HVS-I, genotyping of 22 coding-region SNPs, and a series of computational quality checks based on phylogenetic principles. This database is very informative with respect to mtDNA phylogeny and mutational dynamics, and its size allows us to develop a nearest neighborâ based methodology for mtDNA haplogroup prediction based on HVS-I motifs that is superior to classic rule-based approaches. We make available to the scientific community and general public two new resources: a periodically updated database comprising all data donated by participants, and the nearest neighbor haplogroup prediction tool.

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2007-06-29
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PLoS Genetics
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Theodore G. Schurr is not listed as an individual author on this paper but is part of the Genographic Consortium. A full list of Genographic Consortium members for this paper can be found the Acknowledgements. Correction: The original version of Dataset S1 was truncated. The full dataset can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.0030169 and in the Additional Files section of this record.
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