For those with 23andme accounts, check this out!! !

Post Reply New Topic

Hi,

Download your genome data and go to http://esquilax.stanford.edu/

There, you will be able to submit your data and see whether you match up with neanderthal data.

Here's my results:



According to this article, http://science.kqed.org/quest/2011/08/2 ... l-are-you/ the highest he's seen is 20!! ! So is there a link between neanderthals and autism?

Interesting, but I'm not sure about the neanderthal-autism link. The article you linked to actually had this one under related links: http://science.kqed.org/quest/2011/07/2 ... -genetics/

I think it's a gene-environment interaction.

Just did mine. I came out with a score of 7.

No. If there was, autism would be far more common in Europeans than in any other ethnicity. (Kind of like prominent brows are.) And what evidence I've seen strongly suggests it has the same frequency in most ethnic groups.

23andme now has its own Neanderthal ancestry function. Login and go via the menu or here https://www.23andme.com/you/labs/neanderthal/ .

I'm 2.4% according to 23andme and scored 2 with the OP's url.

There were some US statistics in a thread relating to this earlier in the month, where ASD was much less common in blacks and hispanics. I found the same info on the CDC website:

"Estimated ASD prevalence also varied by race and ethnicity (Table 2). When data from all sites were combined, the estimated prevalence among non-Hispanic white children (12.0 per 1,000) was significantly greater than that among non-Hispanic black children (10.2 per 1,000) and Hispanic children (7.9 per 1,000). Estimated ASD prevalence was significantly lower among Hispanic children than among non-Hispanic white children in nine sites and significantly lower than among non-Hispanic black children in five sites. Only one site (Florida) identified a significantly higher ASD prevalence among Hispanic children compared with either non-Hispanic white or non-Hispanic black children. New Jersey was the only site that identified approximately the same estimated ASD prevalence among non-Hispanic white children, non-Hispanic black children, and Hispanic children. Estimates for Asian/Pacific Islander children ranged from 2.2 to 19.0 per 1,000 although wide confidence intervals suggest that these findings should be interpreted with caution."

Judging by the data, there could be a correlation, but it could also be based on wealth (more likely to be diagnosed) and culture (the Japanese especially seem very ASD as a culture). The New Jersey children's statistics might be due to some state policy on diagnostics in school or other incentive/compulsion in place, but it leans more towards a common prevalence vs an ethnic difference. I don't think I could be swayed either way right now, the data seems good, but the diagnostic quality/quantity is the main thing I question.

That's weird then. My score was 7 with OPs link and:

An estimated 2.9% of your DNA is from Neanderthals. from 23andme (although as it says it's only an estimate).

Yeah the two websites are using different SNPs I guess. 23andme says I'm 33% increased risk of type 2 diabetes while this URL says 77%!

Also the Neanderthals were hunter gatherers so if anything I would expect autistic traits were selected against at that time.

The OP's URL had nothing to do with percentage of DNA--it was a count of the number of SNPs with a Neanderthal link--out of a possible 84, you have 7... and oceandrop has 2-- that is not saying 7% of your DNA or 2% of oceandrop's DNA. The 23andme data is given in terms of a percentage, so that is correct and there is no discrepancy... the additional 0.5% of Neanderthal DNA in your genome appears to result an an additional 5 Neanderthal SNPs.

The second link in the OP had a better explanation and some of the links from that KQED Quest page are quite interesting.

I really want to do 23andme, now.

I am already spending a chunk of cash on an a neurological assessment. I wonder if I can afford this, too.

But how did Oceandrop have 2 SNPs and a virtually identical % as me with 23andme and I had 7 SNPs? I can't see how it measures up that 0.5% is worth 5 SNPs if Oceandrop's 2 SNPs overall = 2.4%. Admittedly my maths is bad but even I can see that doesn't add up. Or are you saying that each SNP is worth a different measure of Neanderthal DNA?

No, it's clear that not all the Neanderthal DNA maps to SNPs, therefore you should not expect a linear correspondence.

Consider the Chimp DNA is 96% identical to humans... 0.5% difference is rather high.

The two websites use different approaches, e.g. interpretome checks 84 SNPs and 23andme checks 180 SNPs.

Also worth pointing out that: -

"even in the ideal case where all of the 180 variants are indeed of Ne-
anderthal origin, they identify only 13 regions, the longest of which spans 160,000
bases. This length is two orders of magnitude lower than the 2.5% of Neanderthal
ancestry in the average genome. Therefore, the number of tag SNPs where one
carries the Neanderthal variant provides very little information regarding the to-
tal amount of Neanderthal ancestry one may have."