At the Seventh International Family Tree DNA Conference for Group Administrators, Bennett Greenspan and those who had made presentations on the final day gathered for a Closing Panel to answer questions from the audience.
Bennett Greenspan
SOURCE: Bennett Greenspan (Houston, Harris County, Texas); photographed by Stephen J. Danko on 06 November 2011.
Q: Are passenger manifests in the public domain?
A: Yes.
Q: Has Jessica Roberts taken a DNA test?
A: No.
Q: Will Family Tree DNA be offering any promotions soon?
A: Yes . FTDNA will have a promotion good for the rest of 2011.
Q: What surname project can adoptees join if they don’t know the surname of their biological fathers?
A: Adoptees can join the “Adopted” surname project and qualify for discounts offered to member of surname projects.
Q: What does FTDNA expect attendees to learn at these events (Family Tree DNA Conferences for Group Administrators)?
A: These conferences are give and take events where FTDNA and attendees learn from each other.
Q: Â Does FTDNA plan to upgrade Y-SEARCH to incorporate 68-111 markers?
A: It is not at the top of FTDNA’s list of priorities.
Q: How long should an adoptee wait for a match before joining the Adopted project?
A: The Adopted project is a point of entry.
Q: Is anything in the works for X-DNA?
A: Yes, but it is a matter of priorities.
Q: Why are surname projects no longer listed in their entirety?
A: They are . You can’t see all names at once because competitors were harvesting surnames from FTDNA.
Q: Does FTDNA plan to incorporate Y-DNA or mtDNA SNP data from 23 and Me?
A: No . Autosomal DNA is the next horizon.
Q: What about heteroplasmy?
A: Heteroplasmy is not genealogically relevant.
Q: Is there information for Canadian immigration from 1820-1830?
A: Yes.
Q: How many hours has Steve Morse put into his One-Step Webpages?
A: He doesn’t know.
Q: Has Steve Morse ever given up?
A: No.
Q: Will someone take over Steve Morse’s website after he’s gone?
A: Yes.
Q:  Does FTDNA treat Recombinational Loss of Heterozygosity (RecLOH) as a single or a multistep mutation?
A: Right now it is treated as a multistep mutation, but FTDNA will eventually change this to a single step mutation.
Q: Can I stop notifications of 12 marker Y-DNA matches?
A: Yes . On the myFTDNA page, hover over “My Account” and click on “Match and Email Settings.”
Q: Will FTDNA lock column headers on the Group Administration Page (GAP)?
A: No . The current version of .NET doesn’t allow that.
Q: How much correlation is needed for a Y-DNA exact match?
A: All STRs and SNPs must match.
Q: How can we predict haplogroups from STRs?
A: You need SNPs to predict most haplogroups.
Q: How well does Family Finder work with Ashkenazi beyond the 3rd generation?
A: If the parents are from diverse groups, Family Finder works well, but not for close, inbred families.
Thomas Krahn discussed a 4×4 sequencing run he performed the previous night . He ran 8 samples . The first 5 were Walk Through the Y samples, 2 were control samples from Roche, 1 was an unenriched sample, and 1 was a sample from Bennett.
The results were overexposed even though he used the recommended number of beads . The length of the segments in the library looks good . He tried to get lengths of 1000, but he got a median of about 600.
He was looking for places where Bennett’s DNA doesn’t match the reference . These are the SNPs . He is looking for high quality differences – enough to discriminate between real differences and errors.
Copyright © 2011 by Stephen J. Danko
