Ancestral background has much to do with our likelihood of developing or staving off disease

But separating the associations between who we are and where we come from, and genetic variations that cause disease, can be difficult and often result in false genetic study leads. A new statistical method, developed by researchers at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, can help those who study the human genome better identify ancestry as they go about isolating the genes that cause disease. The LASER (Locating Ancestry from SEquence Reads) software can establish ancestry using very small amounts of sequence data, scattered across 1% to 10% of the genome and adding only a few dollars to the cost of a genetic analysis. "You can use our method to describe the ancestry of an individual very precisely, even separating individuals from different parts of Finland," said Goncalo Abecasis, the Felix E. Moore Collegiate Professor of Biostatistics at U-M. "In studies of genetic diseases, this information helps separate changes that cause disease from more numerous changes that specify ancestry."