My Haploid Group Isn't Obvious

For Christmas I gave my sister (and myself) starter kits for the National Geographic Genographic Project. The idea of the project is to track the migration of the human species around the planet by tracking either the Y chromosome or mitochondrial DNA. Science has tracked these two bits of the human genome back 60,000 years and isolated them to a very small number of early humans. Each of these two genetic bits have remained pretty much unchanged over the millenia and allow researchers to piece together how humans moved. The idea is that they are gathering DNA from all over the world, both from paying participants, (like me) and from volunteers in the more remote areas of the world. Then they can get a more complete picture of where we all came from and who we all are at the root of our genes. As more participants enter more information will be revealed and we'll all have a bigger family. They aren't promising to tell us what country we're from, or tribe names, or anything like that, just a general picture of who we are, and were we came from.

Yesterday I received my first bit of direct communication from them and they say my "haploid group isn't obvious." So they have to take a few extra weeks to do a more thorough check of my DNA. On the one hand this is good news, it means that I am adding to the project by adding genetic markers that they don't have yet. On the other hand I have to wait a few more weeks, which as anyone who knows me knows is the worst thing you can make me do. My sister tracked the opposite type of DNA from me, tracking our mother's lineage, while I tracked our father's side. I'm assuming that we'll get results from her tests fairly soon.

One of the things that I often think about is that I have no real ethnic or genetic heritage. Unlike a lot of people who can say that they are Irish, or German, or Polish... I have no idea who I am, or where I'm from. I know that this project won't tell me exactly that information, but it will connect me, if not to Germans or the Irish, then to the greater genetic legacy of the world.

1 Response to "My Haploid Group Isn't Obvious"

  • Katherine Says:

    This is fascinating to me. I hope you update your blog with what you discover along the way.

    For most of my life, I didn't know my ancestral heritage either, because I was adopted as a baby.

    Since beginning to do research on my birth mother's line, it has come to mean a lot to me. My research has taken me to Sicily, Ellis Island, and soon to Pennsylvania.