Ron's Private Variants

[Dave Lewis]

Ron & Joy, 

Ron should have depleted his list of Private Variants with his match to Geoff. My records show he had two previously, so the two new matches with Geoff should cover those. The SNP variants remain "private" to you and unnamed until they match up with somebody else, then they are given a "name" and put on the list of Named Variants. 

For those that have not done Big Y and may be unfamiliar with the terminology, a private variant is known to only one individual (I have three) and has a number, which I believe is actually the location of the variant on the Y-chromosome. Once matched to another and named, the name is actually a number with a letter or letters in front of it. For example, Ron's private, unnamed variants were 5202679 and 21190190. These became FT45835 and FT46802, but I don't know which became which. The latter is their terminal SNP. The FT likely stands for Family Tree(DNA). The letters frequently signify the individual or the laboratory that discovered the variant SNP. The terminal SNP for the rest of us is BY42599, where BY=BigY. FTDNA seems to have abandoned BY in favor of FT of late. If you ever see a SNP that begins with CTS, those are, if I remember correctly, the initials of a research professor surnamed Smith at the University of California, Berkeley. The number after the letters is often a sequential numbering of an individual's or a lab's discoveries. There is not much convention to this system. Talk about geeks! These people peer into their microscopes all day long looking for DNA variants. Actually, technology has probably gone well beyond that or we won't be talking about this.

Dave