Human limb found at Dollymount had Irish DNA

Nolanger

That's the headline in today's newspapers. Is this true? How can DNA be Irish? Do we all have a protein sequence that makes us different to other nationalities?

Yes. Well, kind of. You can't tell what's written on a person's passport from their DNA, but you can examine what sort of lineage they had. There are common sequences that would remain unchanged throughout an Irish line which would be different to other countries. Genes can be used to examine a person in a similar way to how a person's appearance could be used. Of course the person would have to have an Irish heritage, as in their ancestors would have to be Irish, not just a few generations. As far as I know, it's possible to examine whether an Irish person's ancestors came from the Normans or Vikings or whoever, and then when those genes came to Ireland common mutations would have distinguished us from English people with Norman or Viking ancestry. Even though everyones genome in it's entirety is different from someone else's in it's entirety, there are common bits and bobs that would imply Irish heritage.

Nolanger

That's interesting. Could this DNA analysis prove once and for all that very few of us are descended from the Celts?

bildo

One of the Dublin universities recently sequenced the "Irish Genome".
I'm a bit skeptical about it myself but have look on google for more infoes.

darjeeling

bildo wrote: »

One of the Dublin universities recently sequenced the "Irish Genome".
I'm a bit skeptical about it myself but have look on google for more infoes.

UCD-led, with collaborators in Ireland and abroad, and it was the genome of an individual of known Irish ancestry going back at least three generations, not 'the Irish Genome'. Paper is here.

Edit:
An earlier paper looking at hundreds of thousands of individual positions in the genomes of 3,000 people from all over Europe showed that you could predict with high accuracy where each person came from, just going on the genome data (link). I don't know if a similar technique was used in this case, though it's now quite cheap and easy to do, so I can imagine it will become part of forensic science if it hasn't already.

Gran Hermano

http://www.rte.ie/news/2011/0329/dollymount.html

Looks like the police in GB had this individual's DNA on file rather than any matching of DNA by nationality.

steddyeddy

Well we have a high percentage of people within the haplogroup of R1b so im guessing this is what they are going by!

Capt'n Midnight

darjeeling wrote: »

though it's now quite cheap and easy to do

and the price is dropping fast, expect to get your genome seqenced for something in the order of €100 by the end of the decade !

darjeeling

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

and the price is dropping fast, expect to get your genome seqenced for something in the order of €100 by the end of the decade !

That wouldn't surprise me at all, though the technique I was referring to was the SNP chip used in the second paper I linked. This has been designed to show the genotypes present at 500,000 single-base positions dotted throughout the genome. The positions targeted have been selected on the basis that they vary between people (at a given position, one person might have genotype AA, another AG, a third GG). Currently it costs a few hundred dollars to run a sample.

fontanalis

darjeeling wrote: »

That wouldn't surprise me at all, though the technique I was referring to was the SNP chip used in the second paper I linked. This has been designed to show the genotypes present at 500,000 single-base positions dotted throughout the genome. The positions targeted have been selected on the basis that they vary between people (at a given position, one person might have genotype AA, another AG, a third GG). Currently it costs a few hundred dollars to run a sample.

The crowd below does it for $200 (but you have to sign up for a $9 a month fee for a year). I got a test done before christmas for $99 (plus $5 a month). if yiu're inetrested in getting one wait until thanksgiving time and it shoudl be around $99 again. The test tells you what haplogroup you belong to (male and female line if you're male, female line if you're female). It's interesting if you're into populaton genetics. But I seriosuly doubt this is the stuff police forces use (although there is a particular genetic marker that is almost exclusively found in Irish males).
https://www.23andme.com/

al28283

I read recently that 99% of Irish people are lactose tolerant because of generations of drinking milk. Many other peoples can't digest milk after a couple of years age, so we must be genetically distinct going back at least a few hundred years for that to have happened

fontanalis

I wouldn't say that would mean distinct; more a case of having a long farming tradition (which is wide spread through out Europe).