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Updated: Feb 15, 2026

Determination of the Mating Efficiency of Haploids in Saccharomyces cerevisiae
Published on: December 2, 2022
Reconstructing an African haploid genome from the 18th century
Anuradha Jagadeesan1,2, Ellen D Gunnarsdóttir1, S Sunna Ebenesersdóttir1,2
1deCODE Genetics/Amgen, Reykjavik, Iceland.
Abstract:
A genome is a mosaic of chromosome fragments from ancestors who existed some arbitrary number of generations earlier. Here, we reconstruct the genome of Hans Jonatan (HJ), born in the Caribbean in 1784 to an enslaved African mother and European father. HJ migrated to Iceland in 1802, married and had two children. We genotyped 182 of his 788 descendants using single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) chips and whole-genome sequenced (WGS) 20 of them. Using these data, we reconstructed 38% of HJ's maternal genome and inferred that his mother was from the region spanned by Benin, Nigeria and Cameroon.
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