From Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia
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.
[1]
References
- DNAtesting
[2]
- Shriver, Mark D. et al.,
"Skin pigmentation,
biogeographical ancestry and
admixture mapping," Hum. Genet.
112, 387-399 (2003)[3]
