New tool simplifies the genetic detective work behind human ancestry
Researchers have released Mixtum, a user-friendly software that helps scientists quickly decode how different ancestral populations mixed together in human DNA. The tool—which works with existing genetic data—could speed up ancestry research for pharmaceutical companies developing population-specific treatments, genealogy firms, and public health organizations studying disease patterns across groups.
Originaltitel: Mixtum: a graphical tool for two-way admixture analysis in population genetics based on f-statistics
<p>Mixtum is a Python-based code that estimates ancestry contributions in a process of two-way admixture based on bi-allelic genotype data. The outcomes of Mixtum come from the geometric interpretation of the f-statistics formalism. Designed with user-friendliness as a priority, Mixtum allows to interactively handle a menu of user-supplied populations to build different mixture models in conjunction with the set of auxiliary populations required by the framework. The results are presented graphically and numerically. Importantly, Mixtum provides a novel index (an angle) that assesses the quality of the ancestral reconstruction of the model under scrutiny. The use and interpretation of the outcomes of Mixtum are explained and illustrated with case studies.Availability and implementation The open source code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/jmcastelo/mixtum and on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17789375. Mixtum is implemented in Python and runs on Linux, Windows and macOS.</p>