Finding deep roots, new genome software infers ancestry with high accuracy

Some people may know where their ancestors lived 10 or 20 generations ago, but the rest of us can learn our distant biological heritage only from our DNA. New genomics analysis software developed by computer scientists at Stanford appears far more adept than prior methods at unraveling the ancestry of individuals. A paper describing the HAPAA system, which takes its name from "hapa," the Hawaiian word for someone of mixed ancestry, appears online today and in the April printed issue of the journal Genome Research.