Thanks for the update on the FTDNA conference, Tim. I had hoped to (finally) get to go this year as I'm on sabbatical, but this time the conference conflicted with a major professional conference, whereas usually I just don't feel I can attend two conferences in the same month as Thanksgiving! Karla Huebner calypsospots AT gmail.com On Tue, Nov 14, 2017 at 1:58 AM, Tim Janzen <[email protected]> wrote: > I haven't seen anyone post information on this list about the FTDNA > conference in Houston that took place this past weekend. Overall, I really > enjoyed it. It was about my 7th or so conference in a row. Debbie Kennett > has written a blog post at > https://cruwys.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/ftdnas-13th- > international-genetic.html > that includes links to some of the blogs and tweets from this conference. > Jennifer Zinck's notes are particularly comprehensive. I also took about 9 > pages of notes. > > > > One thing from the conference that I thought deserves more complete > discussion is the conversion of Family Finder from the Illumina Omni > Express > chip to the Illumina GSA chip which will reportedly be occurring in about 5 > to 6 months. I submitted this question during the Q and A session and I > was > pleased that Elliott Greenspan was willing to address it. There are > currently only 161,882 SNPs that are found in both Family Finder and the > Illumina GSA chip. This is a relatively small number of SNPs and this has > made it challenging for GEDmatch to generate matching HIR data between > Living DNA or 23andMe v5 data and Family Finder data. Eilliott said that > FTDNA had been able to get a concession from Illumina to double the number > of SNPs on the new chip that FTDNA will be using that are identical to the > SNPs found on the Omni Express chip. Presumably that will mean that the > number of SNPs that are found on the new Illumina chip and the Omni Express > chip will be in the range of 320,000 or so. That should be enough to > generate reasonable match lists even without doing any imputation for all > but HIRs in the shorter range (under 15 cMs or so). FTDNA may be able to > improve the quality of matching HIRs by doing at least some imputation. > FTDNA could also do more to generate matching segments with phased data > than > they do currently as well. So far 23andMe seems to be doing a fairly good > job with imputation so that one gets reasonably reliable matches using v5 > data from the GSA chip as compared to v2, v3, and v4 data. The conversion > to the new chip will presumably also impact the data files for people who > test at MyHeritage since FTDNA is processing all of MyHeritage's DNA tests. > I presume that FTDNA will be able to eventually accept Living DNA data and > 23andMe v5 data once FTDNA has made the conversion over to the new > customized GSA chip. I would also like to encourage everyone who has not > done testing of parent/child pairs or trios to test with Family Finder > since > that will improve FTDNA's ability to phase your data. > > > > I hope that the GSA chip is the last major SNP array that Illumina develops > that holds 700,000 or so SNPs and is used for genealogical purposes. The > comparison of data from the Omni Express chip and the GSA chip has been > difficult to do for those of us who like to compare data from all of the > companies' SNP chip results. If you want to see the comparison chart that > shows how much overlap there is between the various different SNP chips as > delivered by each company, see > https://isogg.org/wiki/Autosomal_SNP_comparison_chart. > > Sincerely, > > Tim Janzen > > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to > [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without > the quotes in the subject and the body of the message >