‘Tis the Season for Giving – HOPE!

Hello Research Study Participants!

It is the middle of December and we wanted to share more with you about the study and more generally about what we are doing at the Rutgers University Genetics Coordinating Center (RUGCC) to help educate and fight Breast Cancer.

Genetic Ancestry Reports

Rolling out ancestry

We are excited to announce that genetic ancestry reports for the first 600 participants are ready and will soon be available in the app. You will receive an email to notify you when your ancestry report is ready.

How your ancestry report is generated

When your saliva kit reaches our lab, we extract DNA and use state-of-the-art sequencing machines to read the genetic sequence of almost all genes and a carefully selected set of sites in the genome. We then compare this genetic data to reference groups of individuals from around the world and calculate how similar you are to those groups.

The result is a report like the one below that shows percentages of how similar you are to each group.

There are three levels of results.

Level 1 shows percentages of continental regions (African, Americas, South and Central Asian, East and South East Asian, European and Middle Eastern).
Level 2 splits the percentages into a larger set of smaller regions.
Level 3 is the finest level of resolution. When percentages are too small to report, they are rolled into broader regions. For example, you may see results reported as “Broadly European”, “Broadly African” etc.

In the app you will see a table of percentages and an interactive map. Clicking a row in the table will zoom into that region on the map.

Note, the more people who participate the faster we can generate ancestry reports! Consider encouraging someone you know to join today!

Partnerships

During the month of December, we have continued to reach out to local, regional, and national advocacy organizations to attend events or share our research study with their networks. This month, we partnered with Facing Hereditary Cancer EMPOWERED (FORCE) and Surviving Breast Cancer.

If you know of a community group or support group that might be interested in sharing information about our study with its members, please email us at rugcc@rutgers.edu .