Why does a person's DNA drop from profile page when getting back into earlier generations such as the early 1700's.

+4 votes
263 views
in Genealogy Help by Linda Maples G2G1 (2.0k points)
You should add the dna tag if you are seeking more expert answers.

Edit:  No longer needed!

In a nutshell, because you get approximately, and not exactly half of your DNA from each parent, and this reduces by approximately half each generation you go back, you get to a point where you may inherit no DNA from a specific ancestor, and what you do get from ancestors you have inherited DNA from is remarkably little.

See, for example, Blain Bettinger, Guide to DNA Testing and Genetic Genealogy, 2nd edition. This book gets good reviews, and is currently in bookstores (if you can find one that is open). You can readily find it online; the price is reasonable.

George, one correction: you do get exactly half from each parent. The inexactitude comes at the next generation: you get approximately one-quarter from each grandparent.

Guide to DNA Testing states, in part

The second family tree is a genetic family tree, which contains only those ancestors who contributed to your DNA. While this overlaps with your genealogical family tree, not every person in a genealogical family tree contributes a segment of his or her DNA sequence to the test taker’s DNA sequence. A parent does not pass on all his DNA to his children (only about 50 percent); as a result, bits and pieces of DNA are lost in each generation. Your genetic family tree likely contains fewer ancestors than your genealogical family tree somewhere between five and nine generations back.

J is correct, George, though I believe it's just a semantics issue. You see, barring any genetic abnormalities, each gamete we produce, each spermatozoa or egg cell, contains exactly 23 chromosomes (ergo the name of the eponymous testing company). In that state they're called haploid chromosomes.

At fertilization, when the zygote forms, the two sets of 23 haploid chromosomes join with their complements at the centromeres, becoming diploid chromosomes, and leaving us with our nice and tidy allocation of 46 chromosomes.

So... Again not counting any oddities or abnormalities (and not counting the difference in the sizes of the X and Y chromosomes), we each receive 23 chromosomes from mom and 23 from dad: exactly 50% from each because they can't give us only part of a chromosome.

But... Each parent has 46 chromosomes. It's through the amazingness of meiosis that genetic stuff gets shifted around and recombined between, for example, two Chromosome 7s to produce a single haploid 7 that goes into the gamete. So if we were to compare the actual DNA in the haploid Chromosome 7 of, say, 100 gametes that were produced, we might find that no two of them are the same...because the paired maternal and paternal chromosomes in the parent recombine differently each time. In fact, looking at all 23 haploid chromosomes collectively, we could each theoretically produce 2 to the 23rd power--or 8,388,608--possible unique gametes.

The genius of genetic diversity. How even very small, constrained populations can have enough genetic differentiation for the species to survive. And why a 19th century frontier family with 20 kids would--so long as none were monozygotic twins--have not a single identical genome in the brood.

When we compare the DNA of siblings, they won't be identical; they will always share about 50% of the same half-identical DNA; and the amount of sharing as calculated in centiMorgans will definitely vary. But each of the siblings will have received exactly 50% of their DNA from dad and 50% from mom. They just never get the same 50%.
smiley

3 Answers

+2 votes
Primarily, one supposes, or in part at least, because no one born before 1880 or possibly 1900, has been tested for DNA

Partly because 1 becomes 1/2 which becomes 1/4 which becomes 1/8 which becomes 1/16 which becomes 1/32 and so on backward through time, whether you are measuring DNA or genes or ethnicity or race ... the farther back into time the more ancestors there are until there is a massive diffusion

AND there are others who can explain this much more scientifically and likely they will do so

I would suggest you might want to read through the various posts on g2g about DNA distribution
by Susan Smith G2G6 Pilot (657k points)
+6 votes

Hi Linda!  Welcome to WikiTree!

The autosomal DNA only populates for 8 degrees of separation, which is approx as far as you would expect to find shared matches.

The Y DNA and mt DNA don't drop off.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:DNA_Test_Connections

Cheers

Shirlea

by Shirlea Smith G2G6 Pilot (284k points)
+4 votes
Because if it's autosomal DNA you're talking about, it only goes back a certain number of generations (usually five), and then is useless for way-back-when ancestors.
by Ros Haywood G2G Astronaut (1.9m points)

To illustrate Ros' point :

  • You get 50% of your DNA from each of your parents
  • A maximum of 25% from each of 4 grand-parents
  • A maximum of 12.5% from each of 8 great-grandparents
  • A maximum of 6.25 from each of 16 2x great-grandparents
  • A maximum of 3.125% from each of 32 3x great-grandparents
  • A maximum of 1.56% from each of 64 4x great-grandparents
  • A maximum of 0.78125% from each of 128 5x great-grandparents

Lucy, thank you , that's the chart I was thinking of but could not summon clearly to mind

And to further extrapolate the points made by Ros and Lucy, here's a table I made some time ago to illustrate the theoretical sharing of the same DNA from the same ancestor...because almost always we have to determine ancestral DNA from living or recently-deceased test-takers.

There's an often-mistaken assumption that when we talk about expected total DNA sharing between two cousins, that the same amounts also refer to the cousins sharing the same DNA from a particular ancestor. It doesn't; only to the overall sharing they can expect from their cousinship.

Hopefully the table headings are self-explanatory. Probably too small to read easily; click on the image to see it larger.

that is lovely Edison and SHOULD be on the DNA pages at WT
Lucy, I think I get what you were going for with "maximum x%", but it's not the right word: you can get more than 25% from a grandparent, but it means that you get less than 25% from the other grandparent on that side.

in short, Linda M., if you only get 100 divvied up among 4 grandparents it is not always 25, 25, 25, 25 ... it could be 10, 29, 31, 30 which is still 100 divvied up among the four grandparents ... could be any division of that 100 but still only 100 for all four

J Palotay is right, Lucy.  It should be "average," not "maximum."
Edison, I'm sorry to be so dense but I am having trouble understanding your table (and I do hope I'm not asking stupid questions!).

For reference, I'll refer to the columns as a through i, lettered from left to right.

What is the source of the numbers in column d?  I can see that they aren't column e divided by around 3400, but to me that's what the heading implies.

It looks to me like the numbers in column f are half of those in column d, but why?  Likewise for column g and column e.

You have explained the numbers in column i, but would you please give the column references for the calculation?

Thanks!

Edited to correct typo.

Hiya, Julie! Actually, the answer to some of your questions is in the title of the table.  laugh The Coefficient of Relationship (CoR) has, for many years, served as the basis for calculating a theoretical, expected amount of inherited DNA and DNA sharing. It remains highly useful as a baseline average. You can Google it to find numerous references, but one good one is http://www.genetic-genealogy.co.uk/Toc115570135.html.

It's a simple equation, and can not only be used to estimate DNA sharing by relationship, but also to offer a prediction of the effect of pedigree collapse and inbreeding. Another good reference for the CoR and how it's applied is from Diahan Southard: https://www.yourdnaguide.com/ydgblog/2019/7/26/pedigree-collapse-and-genetic-relationships.

In that article, she also explains the answer to another of your questions, what you referred to as column f, the expected percentage of the same DNA shared by two cousins that was inherited from the same ancestor. Scroll down to Diahan's section, "The math of pedigree collapse." In the second table there and just above it, she explains the simple CoR notion: for grandparents and 1st cousins, you get 25% of each grandparent's DNA and you have four grandparents; the numbers work out to 25% divided by 4, so 6.25%...25% of the 25%. With great-grandparents and 2nd cousins, you have 8 g-grandparents and expect to have about 12.5% of the DNA of each of them: 12.5% divided by 8 equals 1.5625%; and so on.

About centiMorgans. If I could stand on a soapbox and shout out one thing about the way we use autosomal DNA in genealogy, it would be, "The centiMorgan is only a rough estimate, folks! It's just a formulaic guesstimate!" We see far too many conversations about whether 7cM is valid while 6.5cM is not, or whether 12cM is large enough to always be bankable.

By definition, a centiMorgan is nothing but a computational, estimated prediction; we still use essentially the same equation, called the Kosambi Map Function, as developed by Damodar Kosambi 1944. It isn't just an estimate; it's a very rough estimate for two significant reasons: the first is that we're still using a 7-year-old human genome map, or assembly, for all our common genealogy reporting. And even the most current genome maps don't take into account recent discoveries regarding things like recombination hotspots in the autosomes. Our whole basis for assumptions about how frequently which areas of which chromosomes will undergo crossover may well be inaccurate. At the very least, it's dated.

Second, during meiosis and gametogenesis, males and females undergo crossover--recombination--at very different frequencies...females about 70% more often than males. And remember, we estimate a cM based on the potential of crossover at the next meiotic event...a centiMorgan isn't an estimate of what we think happened at a previous meiosis. This means that centiMorgans are calculated against either a male or female genome map. In examples I've given before, the same exact base-pair to base-pair range on the female map may be 27.6cM...on the male map only 4.2cM. Every reported cM value we see for genealogy is what's called sex-averaged. The reporting company will take that 27.6cM and 4.2cM and report the average: 11.7cM.

Further, different testing companies use different algorithms to report centiMorgans, even though they're all (at least currently) reporting against human genome map GRCh37 (we assume GRCh37.p13). AncestryDNA, for example, applies a proprietary form of computational phasing against genotype cohort modeling before they report the size of a match in cMs; many feels that, as a result, Ancestry reports smaller segments overall than other companies. MyHeritage uses what they term "stitching" to do almost the reverse: essentially using similar genotype cohort modeling but to assume that two very small segments might actually be one larger segment. And of course we can't forget that different versions of different microarray chips may be testing as few as 20% of the same SNPs. So in many instances we're using a good deal of guesswork and imputation to determine what a segment actually is even before we apply the estimated prediction of centiMorgan calculation to that segment.

Is the centiMorgan a useful tool? You bet. It's really the only way we have of estimating autosomal genetic relationship. But the cMs we see reported are far, far less precise and accurate than most believe they are. So...

"What is the source of the numbers in column d?  I can see that they aren't column e divided by around 3400, but to me that's what the heading implies."

No, that column is the "Expected % Amount of Total DNA Shared Between Cousins." It's a percentage based on the CoR; it has nothing to do with centiMorgans. If you'll look again at https://isogg.org/wiki/Autosomal_DNA_statistics, you should get your answers to the remaining questions. ISOGG uses the same CoR calculations, and explains how the associated centiMorgan values are derived.

They--and most of the testing companies--start with a baseline assumption that the genome is 6800cM. For reasons described above, we know this is simply an overarching mathematical rounding: inaccurate, but useful for comparisons and it's pretty much all we have right now.

Similarly, the potential for crossover during meiosis varies wildly across the chromosomes and even portions of the same chromosome. But 1cM equates to a 1% chance that a crossover will occur between any two loci on a chromosome at the next meiosis. That works out to being very roughly about once every 1 million base pairs. One percent of 6800cM is, ta dah!, 68. Multiply the CoR estimated average percentage of sharing by 68, and you'll get the figures used by ISOGG and just about everyone else for genealogy. For example: 2nd cousins would expect to share 3.125%; 3.125x68=212.5cM.

Lastly, the final column is quite admittedly a wing-and-a-prayer SWAG. That's why it's noted as "roughly approximated" and "extrapolated." All that's going on there is use of the numbers from the Brenna Henn research paper and guessing at what might be the equivalent chance of same DNA matching by evaluating, as a proportion, both Henn's probability number of detecting any matching DNA, the expected percentage of total DNA shared, and the expected percentage of sharing the same DNA from the same ancestor. The table was done over two years ago, and admittedly I should probably have left the first two cells in that column blank. I should go back and revise that; though it will take some explanation in the footnote to explain why I did. And the Coronapocalypse still has me working 16-hour days so...maybe later.
indecision

Absolutely zero empirical studies to support the percentages in the last column. But the point--at the time--was to show that if you had only x% chance of an nth cousin sharing any detectable DNA at all with you, that we need to be cognizant that there's an even slimmer chance that any two cousins will share the same detectable DNA inherited from the same ancestor.

And since I just did a drive-by and replied to George uptopic, it occurs to me I should also explain why--when we're in such miniscule sharing territories on much of that table--I let Excel just do its thing and spit out strings of decimal places.

It's a low-brow technique sometimes called "reduction to the ridiculous." You see it in all those stupid commercials where they say, "For only 55 cents a day"...which really means they're hiding the fact they're hitting you up for $200 a year.

In this case, I admit the table was done with a tiny bit of frustration in response to the frequent and profligate claims about autosomal DNA evidence being determined for 7th, 8th, and even 9th cousins. Folks new to using DNA for genealogy come to believe that such evidence is the norm, certainly more typical than atypical.

But the truth is that what we commonly use as autosomal DNA triangulation has never been studied in peer-reviewed research. We honestly don't know whether it's a valid and accurate methodology or not. It almost surely is is for fairly close relationships, but for distant cousinships there are reasons, both biological and mathematical, why it probably shouldn't work. That all those "triangulated to 10g-grandparents" claims are very likely false.

That's why there are ridiculous-looking numbers in the table. Which I now regret posting here, but hey.

Edison: "Which I now regret posting here, but hey."

laughA familiar (to me) "Been there and done that" many a time since I began at WT and have begun to practice K.I.S.S.

I think, Edison, you have once again whelmed us ... atta boy, go get'em I say, figuring exposure to math and stats won't kill us 

Related questions

+9 votes
7 answers
+3 votes
3 answers
+4 votes
1 answer
+3 votes
1 answer

WikiTree  ~  About  ~  Help Help  ~  Search Person Search  ~  Surname:

disclaimer - terms - copyright

...