Visualizing the shared nature of human genetic variation

Due to the complexity of the data involved, understanding and visualizing patterns of human genetic variation is often challenging. Many of our tools for data visualization focus on understanding genetic population structure, PCA and STRUCTURE, emphasize the differences among people. Though appropriate for specific applications, these figures are readily misinterpreted by broader audiences. Here, we present a set of Euler diagram based visualizations as a simple tool for demonstrating the shared nature of human genetic variation.