黑料专区 Tyler Biology Professor Enhances Commercial DNA Ancestry Discovery
November 29, 2021
黑料专区 Tyler Office of Marketing and Communications
黑料专区 Tyler Biology Professor Enhances Commercial DNA Ancestry Discovery
November 29, 2021
Media Contact: Beverley Golden
Senior Director of Media Relations
Marketing and Communications
The University of Texas at Tyler
903.566.7303
The University of Texas at Tyler announced that Joshua Banta, PhD, associate professor of biology, collaborated with a genetic ancestry company to enhance their DNA ancestry discovery platform. Banta assisted the Spain-based company ADNTRO, which sells at-home DNA ancestry kits to those who are curious about their genetic makeup and predisposition in areas such as nutrition, sports, health, personality and aging.
Like products from other genetic ancestry companies, ADNTRO offers kits online to customers, who send a saliva sample to their labs and wait for results through the company鈥檚 website and app. Banta鈥檚 work uniquely provides some visualizations of these results that put them into the context of worldwide human populations using computational 鈥減ipelines鈥� 鈥� or workflows 鈥� for large data sets.
The company鈥檚 CEO discovered Banta through his popular YouTube channel dedicated to computational analyses of biological data. The professor鈥檚 expertise is in population genetics and evolutionary biology.
鈥淭his module offers people a better idea of how they fit in with to the picture of global genetic diversity,鈥� said Banta, who also directs the 黑料专区 Tyler Center for Environment, Biodiversity and Conservation. 鈥淏asically, the algorithm compares genetic profiles with other profiles of people in the world and can show how similar and dissimilar you are from people of other countries.鈥�
Banta said the 鈥淎ncestral Shape鈥� module creates graphs of worldwide genetic diversity and shows the customer precisely how they fit in 鈥� for example, whether a customer has more Native American ancestry than the average American. Anyone can visit ADNTRO鈥檚 website and upload their DNA data from other companies for free.
Development lasted three months this summer, and the new feature launched earlier this month, Banta added. For more information, contact Banta at jbanta@uttyler.edu. For additional information about ADNTRO, visit .
With a mission to improve educational and healthcare outcomes for East Texas and beyond, 黑料专区 Tyler offers more than 80 undergraduate and graduate programs to 10,000 students. 黑料专区 Tyler recently merged with The University of Texas Health Science Center at Tyler (now known as The Health Science Center at 黑料专区 Tyler). Through its alignment with The Health Science Center at 黑料专区 Tyler (HSC) and 黑料专区 Health East Texas, 黑料专区 Tyler has unified these entities to serve Texas with quality education, cutting-edge research and excellent patient care. Classified by Carnegie as a doctoral research institution and by U.S. News & World Report as a national university, 黑料专区 Tyler has campuses in Tyler, Longview, Palestine and Houston.