The future of Genetic Genealogy

I recently came across this article by ancestry.com. A quick summary: Ancestry was able to reconstruct a partial genome for a man named David Speegle and his two wives using the shared segments of his descendants. The article finishes with "AncestryDNA (will probably not) help reconstruct the DNA of your great-great-great-grandfather". This is probably true since Ancestry currently does not incorporate a chromosome browser into their DNA package. It does, however, bring up the question: would it be possible to reconstruct the DNA of our ancestors on a larger scale?



I think it could most definitely happen. Let's say that each ancestor had a single profile in a DNA company's database. Much like Wikitree, each profile could have a manager. For the sake of clarity let's call this common ancestor "John" and his parents "Bob" and "Sally".Every time two people determine that John is their common ancestor a notification would be sent to the profile manager. The manager would then verify both their trees and the segment would be added to a list of segments that came from either Bob or Sally that was passed down to John. Now let's say that two other people determine the parents of Bob to be their common ancestor. The segment they share matches the segment that was passed down to John. That would mean the segment came from Bob and would be added to Bob's personal genome file.

Now let's say Bob's incomplete genome was added to the match database. possible descendants would be able to verify their relationship to him as well as see all the profiles of his other descendants even if they don't necessarily match them. This could allow DNA tests to find not just genetically related people, but people related through their common ancestors who didn't happen to inherit common segments. It could be invaluable for facilitating discussions between all family members and even more sharing of information.

If this were to be implemented in the future, however, it would have to be an opt-in service. People would undoubtedly have privacy concerns about contributing segments of their DNA to projects like this and understandably be worried about implications it could have.

If technology like this were to exist in the future it would certainly inspire new and interesting discussions about whether the valuable functionality it would provide would be justified from an ethical standpoint.