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Dumb question: what does it mean to sequence "the" X?

I presume our DNA are not identical. So do they sequence a particular person's Y chromosome? Who's?

How similar are two Y chromosomes from different persons?

Very similar. The difference between you and a chimp is only 4%, the largest difference between two individual humans is about a tenth of that.

The person they picked is pseudonymously HG002, who is an Ashkenazi man who took part in the project and consented to commercial distribution of his genome.

Interesting they chose Ashkenazi, given this ancestry is fairly unique.

https://gnomad.broadinstitute.org/news/images/2018/10/gnomad...

Geneticists like insular populations to reduce signal to noise ratio. Another favorite population is a utah population of mormons for similar reasons. African genetics for example are trickier to parse out cause and effect as there is a lot more genetic diversity (and therefore noise that makes it difficult to identify true signal), but they too are studies sometimes for this reason specifically. The Yoruba are pretty well sequenced. Among europeans, a good resource is the icelandic genome project, not only due to the sample size but the nature of the bottlenecked population.

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