New AI model reconstructs human ancestry from DNA

New AI model reconstructs human ancestry from DNA

A stretch of DNA can look static on a screen, just long rows of A, T, C and G. But buried in those letters are small changes that mark where lineages split, rejoined and drifted over time. Researchers at the University of Oregon say they have built an artificial intelligence system that can read those mutation patterns much the way a language model reads text, then use them to estimate when two genes last shared a common ancestor. The tool, call…