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2026年2月9日100,000 Branches and Counting: What FamilyTreeDNA’s Y-DNA Tree Milestone Means for East Asian Haplogroup Research
On 5 February 2026, commercial genealogy company FamilyTreeDNA crossed 100,000 branches on its public Y-chromosome haplotree—a milestone for paternal-lineage research.
As reported on the DNAeXplained blog, by mid-February the public tree held about 101,000 branches and roughly 859,000 variant positions, built from the data of some 699,000 SNP-tested customers. Maintained by the company’s in-house phylogeneticists (led by chief scientist Michael Sager) together with citizen scientists and academic collaborators, it is the world’s largest reference tree for paternal lineages.
For East Asian research, the significance lies in resolution. East Asia’s major Y-haplogroups—O, C, D, and N—are internally diverse and have long lacked a unified, high-density reference framework. A 100,000-branch tree offers a direct tool for finer subdivision and molecular dating within these haplogroups, and it tightens the link between consumer genealogy testing and academic study.
Source: Roberta Estes. DNAeXplained, 2026-02-06.
