Clusters Galore results, K=73 for Dodecad Project members (up to DOD581)

The results can be found in the spreadsheet. There are 73 clusters with 13 MDS dimensions retained. The spreadsheet contains 558 rows for unrelated project participants, each of which contains the probabilities that each individual belongs to one of the 73 clusters. This is followed by 36 rows for the reference populations, showing how many individuals from each population are assigned to each cluster.

In order to interpret your results, first search for your DOD number, and see which columns you have non-zero probabilities in. For the vast majority of individuals you will be uniquely assigned (100%) in one of the 73 clusters. Then, you can visit the ancestry thread to see who else is assigned to the same cluster as yourself, and also look in the reference populations to see how they are represented in the different clusters.

The following 67 IDs were characterized as outliers:

DOD002 DOD004 DOD006 DOD020 DOD029 DOD030 DOD034 DOD036 DOD060 DOD063 DOD072 DOD075 DOD081 DOD107 DOD126 DOD128 DOD132 DOD133 DOD156 DOD157 DOD168 DOD169 DOD175 DOD183 DOD201 DOD224 DOD234 DOD245 DOD252 DOD303 DOD309 DOD316 DOD326 DOD328 DOD339 DOD348 DOD349 DOD359 DOD363 DOD380 DOD382 DOD385 DOD388 DOD392 DOD393 DOD422 DOD425 DOD430 DOD435 DOD437 DOD489 DOD492 DOD495 DOD500 DOD502 DOD511 DOD521 DOD523 DOD531 DOD533 DOD536 DOD548 DOD571 DOD572 DOD573 DOD574 DOD577

As previously explained, outliers may either be mixed individuals or individuals from particular populations not well represented in the Project. In both cases they appear to be more "distant" from other individuals and from their respective clusters.

Getting back to the 74 inferred clusters:

• Cluster #2 is by far the largest, consisting of mainly of "British Isles"/American White types of people; this grew substantially because of the recent open submission call when many people of this type of ancestry joined
• Cluster #3 is essentially Ashkenazi Jewish, another big group in the Project
• Cluster #5 is not represented in the reference populations except for a single Utah White. This is largely German.
• Cluster #6 is mostly (but not exclusively) French.
• Cluster #9 is largely Finnish and also includes some East Slavs.
• Cluster #12 is essentially South Italian/Sicilian/Greek
• Cluster #14 is mostly Assyrian/Armenian
• Cluster #16 is mostly Balkan
• Cluster #21 is mostly Scandinavian
• Cluster #27 is mainly Balto-Slavic
• Cluster #29 is essentially Iberian

I covered most of the largest clusters, but there are also plenty of smaller ones. So, make sure you contribute/read the ancestry thread to get a feel for the kind of people that share your cluster. Many of mixed-race participants (e.g., African Americans) are split into multiple clusters; I recently observed that this is the case for highly variable populations with inter-continental admixture.

Don't forget also, that sharing a cluster does not imply a very strong genetic similarity, as clusters may be either very tight or very loose. This analysis is better at identifying differences than at confirming strong similarities.

Readers of the blog will be aware that many of these clusters can be subdivided further if a regional analysis is carried out (e.g., the Assyrian-Armenian one), while others have proven difficult to split meaningully (e.g., the Iberian one into Spanish vs. Portuguese).

This time around, I included all the Genomes Unzipped people as well as Lily and Greg Mendel (LIL001, GRM001).

I will be exploring these clusters further, and any further regional structure that I may discover will be posted in this blog. So, do subscribe to the feed as there may be additional results for your sample ID.