City College student Thomas Hurt pointed at a computer screen showing a breakdown of his own DNA and said, “That right here, this is me.”
Hurt, 26, and dozens of other City College undergraduate students are reconstructing their own ancient family histories as part of coursework for biology professor Michael Hickerson’s Anthropological Genomics class.
“The majority of my DNA comes from sub-Saharan Africa, but I also have 12% Mediterranean, 9% Northern European. I know my great-great-great-grandfather on my father’s side is Caucasian. This sheds more light into my lineage,” Hurt said during class last week in the college’s Marshak Science Building.
Hurt is also 3% Native American, which he attributed to family lore about his great-great-grandmother’s heritage.
“I wish we could trace what tribe,” he said.
Hickerson’s class — offered for the first time this spring — is just one component of the professor’s New York City Student Ancestry Project, which kicked off in February as his students and undergraduates at several other colleges took cheek swabs at the American Museum of Natural History.
Through Hickerson’s project, 200 college students are participating in a global research initiative run by National Geographic called the Genographic Project, which uses DNA to map human migration throughout history.
Hickerson secured a National Science Foundation grant to purchase 200 National Geographic Geno 2.0 kits — which test for nearly 150,000 DNA markers — one for each student.
Hickerson and his students will present results from the initiative — one of the most recent examples of the City University of New York’s commitment to STEM, or science, technology, engineering and math — on April 23 at a second American Museum of Natural History event.
“Everybody has an idea of where in the world their ancestors come from,” Hickerson, who looks like a rumpled hipster with a beard and horn-rimmed glasses, told students during last week’s anthropological genomics class. “For some of you, it’s going to be very complex.”
In class, they used a Web-based tool called Admixturemap to explore historical moments where different populations in their genomes came together to create shared DNA.
“The admixtures we’re going to be exploring here happened 600, 700, 1,500 years ago,” he said.
Kai Van Vlack, 24, a senior who lives in Murray Hill, said he is invested in discovering his family’s genetic anthropology.
“My father’s an orphan so we don’t really know anything about his family. My mom’s Dominican-Peruvian. Those countries both have pretty poor record keeping. This is interesting to me personally because we have no family history on one side and very little on the other,” Van Vlack said.
His genome testing revealed he was 31% Mediterranean, 23% Native American and 25% Northern European. He was surprised to find that he was 4% sub-Saharan African.
“That means there’s got to be a relatively recent ancestor from there,” he said.
Van Vlack is thrilled to be part of the course.
“We talk a lot about the latest technology — and this represents a piece of that,” he said of the genome tracing.
Tiffany Leung, 24, a senior who emigrated from China to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, as a teen, learned from her genomes that 67,000 years ago, she had ancestors in east Africa.
“I’m half Filipino, half Chinese,” said Leung. “I read my results and they said I have some Vietnamese in my genetic information and also 5 to 10% from Finland . . . I always thought I don’t have a Chinese face structure.”
In several weeks students will compare Hickerson’s raw DNA data with his father’s — and try to predict who is taller without seeing the elder Hickerson.
“There are about 200 places in the human genome that can predict height,” Hickerson said.
In weeks ahead the class will also run their own analyses on the raw data from their DNA tests.
“We’re learning about the complexities underlying human history and how that can show up in our genomes personally,” Hickerson said.
“People have been surprised to have a certain level of Denisovan ancestry,” he said referring to a Paleolithic-era, sister species of Neanderthals.
“Other people are surprised to have results that don’t corroborate their family’s oral history.”
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