The analyses have now been completed, and we are waiting for the scientific paper to be published. Stay tuned for the results!

The research is led by Professor Ashraf Al-Nahari. The samples come from mummies preserved in museum and university collections.

Longtime YSEQ collaborator and Yemen project administrator Yahya Alalie helped make the project possible.

Yahya worked to secure the necessary government, embassy, and import permits to legally transport the ancient samples to Germany.

After a challenging journey through Yemen and Saudi Arabia, the carefully packaged samples finally reached Berlin.

The bone and tooth samples were successfully delivered to the YSEQ laboratory for DNA analysis.

For Yahya, years of work finally became reality:

“My dream became true!”

Yemen is especially important for population genetics. Located between Africa and Asia, it has been connected for millennia to major trade routes across Arabia, India, and East Africa.

Its ancient DNA may reveal clues about migrations between Africa and Eurasia.

The mummies are estimated to be around 2,500–4,000 years old.

Studying their DNA offers a rare opportunity to investigate the population structure of ancient Yemen and its genetic connections with populations from Africa and Eurasia.

Twenty ancient individuals. Thousands of years of Yemeni history. And potentially a new window into the genetic history connecting Africa and Asia.

They also make it difficult to identify which mismatching SNP interrupts a block and at what position. That makes it hard to return to the BAM file and determine whether a mismatch is well supported, an artifact, or caused by insufficient coverage at that exact site.

To address these shortcomings, we built our own chromosome browser at YSEQ. I developed the concept and initial command-line scripts using bcftools over several months. Hunter implemented a clean probabilistic algorithm to detect block ranges.

Amelie, our new bioinformatics student, helped finish the web service and gave it a modern, user-friendly layout. The upload works like CladeFinder: two raw files can be uploaded by drag-and-drop.

The analysis displays chromosomes in 100,000 bp blocks, with green/yellow/red segments indicating full/half/mismatch respectively. Blue blocks indicate detected segments. Clicking a block or segment opens a menu to analyze the section further.

You can also download small VCF files to inspect individual SNPs. We plan to add more functionality to the menu, but we hope Chromato is already useful to DNA genealogists for analyzing related family members or inspecting inherited traits.

Try Chromato with your own files and compare the results to other chromosome browsers. Uploaded files are automatically erased after one hour if they have not been accessed for 30 minutes.

We welcome your feedback and hope this tool benefits the DNA genealogy community. We’ll publish the source code in a Git repository in the coming days.

Note: this software is in development and is not intended for clinical or diagnostic use.

Authors: Hunter Provyn, Amelie Pée, Thomas Krahn

Her mitochondrial DNA revealed the haplogroup:

mtDNA T1a1

YSEQ ID: 72959

Even centuries after her death, DNA can still reveal part of her biological history and maternal ancestry.

Discover your own maternal lineage with YSEQ mtDNA testing.

www.yseq.net

For genetic analysis, a bone sample from her tibia was sent to the Institute of Legal Medicine at Charité, and YSEQ performed whole-genome sequencing (WGS) in our laboratory.

Explore the mysterious stones of the Eastern Steppes and test your haplogroup with YSEQ.
www.yseq.net