New territory
A consortium led by scientists at the University of Oxford and Harvard Medical School has constructed the world’s most detailed genetic map. A genetic map specifies the precise areas in the genetic material of a sperm or egg where the DNA from the mother and father has been reshuffled in order to produce this single reproductive cell. The biological process whereby this reshuffling occurs is known as “recombination.” While almost every genetic map built so far has been developed from people of European ancestry, this new map is the first constructed from African-American recombination genomic data. “This is the world’s most accurate genetic map,” said David Reich, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, who co-led the study with Simon Myers, a lecturer in the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford. African-Americans often have a mixture of African and European ancestry from over the last 200 years. Reich and Myers are...