The interest of informative ancestry markers (AIM) and their fields of application

Abstract

This review focuses on the study of biogeographic ancestry using the Accurate Ancestry Identification Panel. Autosomal markers may provide little information about the nature of an individual's admixture due to ongoing human recombination and migration. Biogeographic ancestry assessment (BGA) is a term used to describe ancestry through DNA testing. This is usually accomplished by testing specific regions of DNA called ancestry information markers (AIMs). AIMs are chosen because they expose significantly different frequencies between different populations in different parts of the world. The panels of these AIMs can be assessed using next-generation sequencing (NGS) to predict the geographical origins of a person of interest's ancestors, usually in terms of continent of origin, and sometimes by smaller geographic regions. The use of ancestry informative markers (AIM) to identify genomic ancestry can be useful for a variety of studies in evolutionary genetics, biomedical research, and forensic analyses. However, there remains a major challenge in determining AIMs for populations with complex and highly mixed ancestry.