23andMe helps to fund worldwide survey of genetic diversity

I'll be posting more about the two massive genome-wide surveys of human genetic variation that were published this week - one in Nature and another in Science - once I've had some time to digest the vast amount of information they contain (the Nature paper comes with an overwhelming 66 pages of close-packed supplementary information!)

For now, I just wanted to point out that the more comprehensive of the studies (the Science one), which looked at 650,000 genetic markers in more than 1,000 individuals from 51 populations, was partially funded by 23andMe - as the company quite modestly notes at the bottom of a recent post on their official blog, The Spittoon. That's a smooth move on 23andMe's part - funding the study while allowing free access to this valuable data-set builds good-will in the scientific community, while 23andMe secures a very useful source of information for their ancestry comparisons.

If you want to get hold of the raw genotype data for the studies, grab them from the CEPH website. In fact, these data were freely available for several months prior to their official publication (I've been using them in my own research) - serious kudos to the researchers for granting such open access to their hard-earned data.