Finnish Study Reveals Maternal Genetic Influence on Adult Heart Health news.europawire.eu - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from news.europawire.eu Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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Commercially available gene tests that shed light on individual’s origins are popular. They provide an estimate of the geographic regions where one’s ancestors come from. To arrive at such an estimate, the genetic information of an individual is compared to information pertaining to reference groups collected from around the world.
The findings now made by researchers from the University of Helsinki, Aalto University and the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare make it possible, for the first time, to make similar comparisons within Finland.
The results of a new study made it possible to follow the traces of 20th century events in our genes and assess the effect of migration on the genetic mixing of the population. For example, it was possible to trace the migration of the evacuees from Finnish Karelia all across Finland on an annual level by exploring the share of the Karelian ancestry among the newborns of a given region.
Credit: Kerminen S, et al. (2021) PLOS Genetics
A team of researchers led by Matti Pirinen of the University of Finland used more than 18,000 Finnish samples to take an incredibly detailed look at how Finnish genetics have shifted, year by year, from the 1920s to the 1980s. They describe their results in a new paper published March 4th in
PLOS Genetics.
Tens of millions of individuals have taken direct-to-consumer tests to find out their genetic ancestry profile. So far, these tests can only estimate ancestry on the scale of countries or continents, but Pirinen and colleagues wanted to take a more detailed look. They estimated the genetic ancestry of 18,463 Finnish individuals, tracking their genetics back to 10 distinct, original populations. Using this info, they looked at how the country s genetics changed each year between 1923 and 1987 in 12 geographical regions. The researchers observed major changes associated with World War II, when Finland lost parts of its eastern terri