Seeking Diversity (Especially Families):
Because the PGP is self-recruiting, we don’t have a very balanced set of participants. “Self-recruitment” means that all participants have enrolled in our project through word of mouth, finding our website and enrolling online. To put it bluntly, that means we mostly end up with young white men.... ...Research within one or two racial/ethnic categories isn’t necessarily a virtue, biracial and multiracial heritage may be even more interesting to some researchers and can open more areas for future.... In particular, NIST is looking for "trios": two parents and a child. Researchers like to use samples from trios because they know every piece of DNA in the child comes from one of the parents. This makes it easier to assess error rates — and that sort of quality control is what NIST expects the genome material to be used for. We think all such family groups are valuable, but current trios in the PGP haven’t been the most diverse....
Reader Paul brought this to my attention. I haven't been too interested in the PGP for myself because it's just so slow to "play" with whole genomes (~3 GB) as opposed to 1 million SNPs. But over Christmas I'll look into signing up, and see if they are interested in my own "trio." I also thought I'd pass this along to readers, though my readership actually looks almost exactly like current PGP participants, so I don't know if I'll be contributing to the problem.
