re: #359 CuriousLurker

Full sequencing of the 3 billion base pairs in a person’s chromosomes is still a bit expensive (over $1000/person) so it is still somewhat rare.

In Iceland the commie gubmint decided it would be neat to see if they could move medicine along by combining many genome sequenced individuals with the very well documented Scandinavian family trees.

They did several thousand people.

Given the small set of Scandinavian founders in Iceland everyone ends up not being too distant cousins of each other.

By comparing then the sequences of cousins and comparing the results against familial medical conditions one can figure out which alleles of certain genes, or perhaps the absence of entire genes, or other anomalies, can lead to which medical conditions.

As an added benefit, given very long family trees, they’ve been able to compare Y chromosomes of known male cousins and figure out (again, this is not new just better data) mutation rates along the Y chromosome, which is useful for anthropology.