Ancestry-informative marker
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An ancestry-informative marker (AIM) is a gene, generally of humans, which have several polymorphisms that exhibit substantially different frequencies between races. For example, the Duffy Null allele (FY*0) has a frequency of almost 100% of Sub-Saharan Africans, but occurs very infrequently in other races. A person having this gene is thus very likely to have some African ancestors. By using a number of AIMs one can estimate the ancestral (racial) proportion of an individual, as well as confidence intervals of the estimates. By using a suite of these markers more or less evenly spaced across the genome, they can be used in a cost-effective way to discover novel genes underlying complex diseases in a technique called admixture mapping or "mapping by admixture linkage disequilibrium". A collection of AIMs that distinguish African and European populations contains 3011 highly differentiated SNP's. [link]
References
- DNAtesting [link]
- Shriver, Mark D. et al., "Skin pigmentation, biogeographical ancestry and admixture mapping," Hum. Genet. 112, 387-399 (2003)[link]
See also
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