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Ancestry deconvolution is the task of identifying the ancestral origins of chromosomal segments of admixed individuals. It has important applications, from mapping disease genes to identifying loci potentially under natural selection. However, most existing methods are limited to a small number of ancestral populations and are unsuitable for large-scale applications.In this article, we describe Ancestry Composition, a modular pipeline for accurate and efficient ancestry deconvolution. In the first stage, a string-kernel support-vector-machines classifier assigns provisional ancestry labels to short statistically phased genomic segments. In the second stage, an autoregressive pair hidden Markov model corrects phasing errors, smooths local ancestry estimates, and computes confidence scores.Using publicly available datasets and more than 12,000 individuals from the customer database of the personal genetics company, 23andMe, Inc., we have constructed a reference panel containing more than 14,000 unrelated individuals of unadmixed ancestry. We used principal components analysis (PCA) and uniform manifold approximation and projection (UMAP) to identify genetic clusters and define 45 distinct reference populations upon which to train our method. In cross-validation experiments, Ancestry Composition achieves high precision and recall.

The genome of an admixed individual with ancestors from isolated populations is a mosaic of chromosomal blocks, each following the statistical properties of variation seen in those populations. By analyzing polymorphisms in the admixed individual against those seen in representatives from the populations, we can infer the ancestral source of the individual’s haploblocks. In this paper we describe a novel approach for ancestry inference, HAPAA (HMM-based analysis of polymorphisms in admixed ancestries), that models the allelic and haplotypic variation in the populations and captures the signal of correlation due to linkage disequilibrium, resulting in greatly improved accuracy. We also introduce a methodology for evaluating the effect of genetic divergence between ancestral populations and time-to-admixture on inference accuracy. Using HAPAA, we explore the limits of ancestry inference in closely related populations.

To study gene evolution across a wide range of organisms, biologists need accurate tools for multiple sequence alignment of protein families. Obtaining accurate alignments, however, is a difficult computational problem because of not only the high computational cost but also the lack of proper objective functions for measuring alignment quality. In this paper, we introduce probabilistic consistency, a novel scoring function for multiple sequence comparisons. We present ProbCons, a practical tool for progressive protein multiple sequence alignment based on probabilistic consistency, and evaluate its performance on several standard alignment benchmark data sets. On the BAliBASE, SABmark, and PREFAB benchmark alignment databases, ProbCons achieves statistically significant improvement over other leading methods while maintaining practical speed. ProbCons is publicly available as a Web resource.

Ancestry deconvolution, the task of identifying the ancestral origin of chromosomal segments in admixed individuals, has important implications, from mapping disease genes to identifying candidate loci under natural selection. To date, however, most existing methods for ancestry deconvolution are typically limited to two or three ancestral populations, and cannot resolve contributions from populations related at a sub-continental scale. We describe Ancestry Composition, a modular three-stage pipeline that efficiently and accurately identifies the ancestral origin of chromosomal segments in admixed individuals. It assumes the genotype data have been phased. In the first stage, a support vector machine classifier assigns tentative ancestry labels to short local phased genomic regions. In the second stage, an autoregressive pair hidden Markov model simultaneously corrects phasing errors and produces reconciled local ancestry estimates and confidence scores based on the tentative ancestry labels. In the third stage, confidence estimates are recalibrated using isotonic regression. We compiled a reference panel of almost 10,000 individuals of homogeneous ancestry, derived from a combination of several publicly available datasets and over 8,000 individuals reporting four grandparents with the same country-of-origin from the member database of the personal genetics company, 23andMe, Inc., and excluding outliers identified through principal components analysis (PCA). In cross-validation experiments, Ancestry Composition achieves high precision and recall for labeling chromosomal segments across over 25 different populations worldwide.

Roughly one in three individuals is highly susceptible to motion sickness and yet the underlying causes of this condition are not well understood. Despite high heritability, no associated genetic factors have been discovered to date. Here, we conducted the first genome-wide association study on motion sickness in 80,494 individuals from the 23andMe database who were surveyed about car sickness. Thirty-five single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were associated with motion sickness at a genome-wide-significant level (p< 5e-8). Many of these SNPs are near genes involved in balance, and eye, ear, and cranial development (e.g., PVRL3, TSHZ1, MUTED, HOXB3, HOXD3). Other SNPs may affect motion sickness through nearby genes with roles in the nervous system, glucose homeostasis, or hypoxia. We show that several of these SNPs display sex-specific effects, with as much as three times stronger effects in women. We searched for comorbid phenotypes with motion sickness, confirming associations with known comorbidities including migraines, postoperative nausea and vomiting (PONV), vertigo, and morning sickness, and observing new associations with altitude sickness and many gastrointestinal conditions. We also show that two of these related phenotypes (PONV and migraines) share underlying genetic factors with motion sickness. These results point to the importance of the nervous system in motion sickness and suggest a role for glucose levels in motion-induced nausea and vomiting, a finding that may provide insight into other nausea-related phenotypes such as PONV. They also highlight personal characteristics (e.g., being a poor sleeper) that correlate with motion sickness, findings that could help identify risk factors or treatments.