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Ultimate genealogy
A little theoretical exercise. Assuming we could sequence the genome of every single human being living on earth, and had infinite computing power to analyse the data, would there be enough information in this data to construct an exact family tree for all humanity?
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yeah, but by then you need infinite amount of paper to draw on. -
Except for those of us that have Neanderthals in our lineage. Besides that, I believe there would still be problems with ambiguity. Even with the genomes we have now it is difficult to asses which groups are more similar.Comment
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I believe if allele discrimination and phasing could be accomplish genome wide (we would know which region came from father/mother) it should be possible.Comment
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I’m not a sequencing expert. I’m a purification scientist who uses NGS to evaluate workflows my group develops. With this perspective, we think about the sample first and the NGS workflow second. The sequencer is an exceptionally honest reporter, but it can only report on what you give it, so whether you get clean, interpretable data from an NGS workflow is largely determined before you begin.
Here are nine questions we think about, in roughly the order they matter, before...06-18-2026, 07:11 AM -
Data variability is still an issue in sequencing technologies despite the advances in reproducibility and accuracy of these platforms. But the problem does not originate in the sequencing itself, but in the previous steps, before the sample reaches the sequencer.
The first step is collection, followed by preservation and sample preparation for analysis. Most scientists overlook those steps, but not being careful might just be skewing the experiment’s results.
...06-02-2026, 10:05 AM
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