ANCESTRYbyDNA: An Aid in Studying Racial Identities

描述（由申请人提供）：该SBIR应用程序的主要目标是创建一个桌面平台，用于从DNA样本中测量生物祖先比例，以帮助社会科学家研究种族身份。鉴于种族问题的多重衡量标准，以及最近联邦指令要求在官方表格和调查中使用多种族分类，关于种族问题的人口学研究正变得越来越困难。例如，种族定义的日益复杂性使得政府难以衡量和评估种族进步，或者在统计系统中制定一致的种族衡量标准。与此同时，该国对研究种族的需求也相应增加。然而，来自联邦机构的压力越来越大，要求就这一问题达成共识，再加上关于如何最好地衡量这一问题的辩论，导致人口学领域的一些人认为种族分类危机迫在眉睫（Harris，2000年）。以众所周知的DNA测试为基础的有关种族的衡量标准有严重的技术和理论局限性。这些测试中最广泛使用和最知名的测试存在统计、实践和伦理问题，因为它们将个人粗略地“归类”为一个类别。例如，传统的DNA测试无法识别个体祖先起源的多样性。基因组学的最新进展和最近发布的一项受专利保护的测试，称为DNA的祖先，已经产生了第一个能够揭示每个人体内精确祖先比例的措施。在SBIR应用中提出的桌面系统将把最近宣布的ANCELLUM通过DNA测试与微阵列芯片阅读器、笔记本电脑和新软件相结合，以创建一个平台，人口统计学家和其他社会科学家可以很容易地将其整合到他们的调查研究工作中。虽然不是衡量种族的标准，但这一创新系统至少为科学家提供了一个探索性工具，供他们努力了解塑造种族身份的社会和文化力量。人口统计学家将有一个复杂的措施，能够确定混合比例，为他们提供了进行进一步的统计分析比较祖先的比例与自我报告，父母，和种族的观察措施的选择。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The principle objective of this SBIR application is to create a desktop platform for measuring biological ancestry proportions from DNA samples to assist social scientists in their study of racial identities. Demographic research on race is becoming increasingly difficult given its multiple measures and the recent federal directive requiring the use of multiracial classification on official forms and surveys. The growing complexity in defining race makes it difficult for the government to measure and assess racial progress, for example, or to put in place a consistent measure of race across statistical systems. Simultaneously, there is a corresponding growth in the country's need to study race. Yet, the growing pressure from federal agencies to reach a consensus on this topic, coupled with the debate over how best to measure it, has led some within demography to suggest there is a looming crisis in racial classification (Harris, 2000). Related measures of race, based on well- known DNA tests, have serious technical and theoretical limitations. The most widely used and best known of these tests suffer from statistical, practical, and ethical problems because they crudely "bin" individuals into a single category. For example, traditional DNA tests cannot recognize diversity in an individual's ancestral origins. Recent advances in genomics and a recently released patent-protected test, called ANCESTRY by DNA, have resulted in the first measure capable of revealing the precise ancestral proportions within each individual. The desktop system proposed in this SBIR application will merge the recently announced ANCESTRY by DNA test with a micro-array chip reader, laptop computer, and new software to create a platform which demographers and other social scientists can easily integrate into their survey research efforts. While not a measure of race, this innovative system at least offers scientists an exploratory tool for use in their effort to understand the social and cultural forces shaping racial identities. Demographers will have at their disposal a sophisticated measure capable of identifying admixture proportions, offering them the option of conducting further statistical analyses comparing ancestry proportions with self-report, parental, and observational measures of race.