Projects & Grants




Genomic formation of Indo-Europeans: new approaches to genetic admixture modelling guided by simulated data
Project Id21-27624S
Main solverM.Sc. Pavel Flegontov, Ph.D.
Period1/2021 - 6/2024
ProviderStandardní grantový projekt GA AV
Statesolved
AnotationHuman archaeogenetics is undergoing explosive growth, with thousands of ancient individuals sequenced per year. While ancient DNA sequencing protocols became standardized and reached industrial scale, standardization of data analysis protocols is conspicuously lacking. To date by far the most attention was focused on the Neolithic and later periods in West Eurasia, characterized by high mobility and admixture of people, hence tasks facing a genetic data analyst in this area are inherently complex. Key results on the genetic origin of Indo-European speakers were obtained using qpAdm, a popular admixture modelling algorithm that has never been tested on realistically complex simulated histories. Our preliminary results show that common qpAdm protocols result in very high false positive and false negative rates. To circumvent this problem we propose to optimize qpAdm protocols on simulated data. We plan to verify key findings on the history of Indo-Europeans and advance our understanding of the genetic origin of the Yamnaya culture people using qpAdm and admixture graphs.