The new map

Now that we understand what the populations mean, the challenge is to convey it. No one is going to read the label “Cambodian/Thai” and immediately understand that it means “Closer to Khmer than to Kinh, Dai, Han or Telugu”. This is why we have been reluctant to display such a label in the past. We need to make clear what our categories mean without swamping you in verbosity.

The new map

The first solution is the new map (above). For each reference population, we have a pretty good idea of where it was collected. We mark it for you on the map with a small symbol. The symbol will be “✓” if you match this reference population or “∅” if you do not match this population (if it is hard for your to see the symbols, zooming in may help — you can use the scrollwheel, double-click, pinch on a touchscreen or use the buttons in the bottom left).

Next, we will color regions based on which populations they are closest to. The concept of “closest” is geometric, with a handful of corrections to compensate for oceans and mountains. We hope that by keeping things simple, we make intuitively apparent the underlying truth: the points are what we actually know, everything else is deduced from them.

For coloring, we offer you several options to better understand your ancestry:

The “Colors: Same as Above” just paints each region based on the colors in your ring.

The “Greyscale: Indicating Percentage” indicates the strength of signal that the algorithm observed from each region. Note that this is per-region, and small adjacent regions (each of which alone is a small fraction of your ancestry) can add up. When in doubt, check the pie chart.

The “Both at once” combines the colors in your ring with the strength of the signal.

Regardless of view, you can click any symbol or colored region, for a detailed explanation of why it’s there.

A Hierarchical View

In addition to details and maps, we have introduced the concept of taxonomic hierarchy. It looks like this:

Mock data used for testing

This has three big advantages.

First, if our user hasn’t heard of (for example) the Mende people, she can still see at a glance that they are African. Then she can look at the map for more details.

Rather than guess or give up, we place DNA in the category we can with the label “Ambiguous”.

Second, if she is not fond of mental arithmetic, she can still see how her ancestry breaks down into European, African and Native American.

The third advantage is that it allows us to express limited knowledge. In our hypothetical case here, we are unable to precisely match 2.1% of her ancestry, but we are able to say what continent it is from. Rather than guess or give up, we place it in the category we can with the label “Ambiguous”. In much the same way, we can also display ambiguous ancestry one step down the tree, when we can tell category but not exact population. Roughly 90% of users will see ambiguity somewhere in their ancestry.

What Comes Next

In the near future, we hope to get your feedback to our ancestry report. While Facebook is great to compare results with other people, we would like to encourage you to send us emails to info@dna.land, because then we have your username and can take a deeper look at your results. We are aware that the reference panel is not complete. We need more reference populations such as Cree, Ojibwa, Algonquins in North America, the Afar and Oromo in East Africa, and the Czech in Europe.

For everything we do, we need more participants. Please encourage your colleagues, family, and friends to join DNA.Land. Our website is free, not-for-profit, and runs by academics in Columbia University and the New York Genome Center.

Comments:

[1] For a more general discussion see our previous post: “What is ancestry”.

[2] Nobody is really monoethnic, but we generally require that at least all grandparents of the person self-identify themselves from the same population.