Awesome, I appreciate that. Ok so my question for the researcher would be:
1. Circumstances where both mtDNA and Y chromosome are shared between biological father and pedigreed father. I think the Biblical term is Levirate marriage.
2. Circumstances without Y where maternity is secretly disputable and paternity uncontentious. I think the researcher called this secret adoption.
At distances longer than several generations, is there noise in the measure of autosomal matches such that you cannot detect these?
I'd argue that after 5 generations your descendants only have (0.5^5) no more than 3% of your genetic material, and if there's some ambiguity to one of your founders (say who has a 50% similarity to the one stated in the pedigree) then that drops to 1% (rounding down).
1% of the human genome (3billion bp) is still 30M bases, which could easily contain 1 or 2 genes which you may have genotyped, depending on the resolution of your genotyping chip (usually 10M markers spread out over the entire genome, and usually clustered around variants/genes of interest).
So yeah, even 5 generations down these differences could be detected at the variant level. Even at 10, you could still _theoretically_ find differences.
I stress theoretically, because the chance of you having all the individuals from a pedigree genotyped at the same time using the same tech (and thus the same subset of common genotypes to compare) is slim to none.
I'd say 5 generations is a rough rule of thumb where the signal is not that much higher than the noise.
1. Circumstances where both mtDNA and Y chromosome are shared between biological father and pedigreed father. I think the Biblical term is Levirate marriage.
2. Circumstances without Y where maternity is secretly disputable and paternity uncontentious. I think the researcher called this secret adoption.
At distances longer than several generations, is there noise in the measure of autosomal matches such that you cannot detect these?