Over at Discover Magazine, Razib Khan looks at a recent paper called “Principal Component Analysis under Population Genetic Models of Range Expansion and Admixture” which takes a detailed look at the synthetic maps that dominate gene expression research. Theoretically showing how humans have migrated across continents and genes have varied over ages, modern research seems to indicate that these supposed details are actually just visualization artifacts of a flawed data analysis algorithm.
And yet one aspect of this great work which never caught on was the utilization of “synthetic maps” to visualize components of genetic variation between populations. This may have been fortuitous, a few years ago a paper was published, Interpreting principal components analyses of spatial population genetic variation, which suggested that the gradients you see on the map above may be artifacts:
via Live not by visualization alone | Gene Expression | Discover Magazine.
