Anybody had any DNA testing done?

I ordered and mailed back the National Geographic kit around Christmas. No results yet. I'm adopted and don't know much about my biological background. I was told Irish/Polish/German on my biological mom's side, so I'm curious to see how accurate that is and anything else I might be able to learn.
 
Doubt said:
Sample collection is easy. But then somebody has to pay for the testing.
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Full genomes are down into the three figure range, less than some monthly premiums.

Just think how much can be saved by not buying treatments that won't work on YOU, or that are totally unnecessary.

Biggest impact so far is on Tamoxifen for breast cancer. They gene test first, and if you have the specific genetic variant, it won't work, so they cure you quicker with the proper treatment. Not waste $50,000- and several months.
 
Doubt said:
Sample collection is easy. But then somebody has to pay for the testing.
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In the UK, that would be the NHS, in other words, the government, or to put it another way, the taxpayer. Given the known control freakery of various governments and the way they love to spend taxes, that is unlikely to be a barrier.
So far the genetic testing services that are available have not proven themselves to be reliable. 23andme got their order to stop the marketing of their product based on the health testings just after I signed up for it. One person that tried several different services found the health results all over the map. Here is the NYT article about that case:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/31/science/i-had-my-dna-picture-taken-with-varying-results.html?_r=0

Quoting from the NYT article:
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That accords with things I've read regarding use for establishing evolutionary lineages. It has a way to go yet.
 
Be the match marrow registry informed my that I have an uncommon HLA type:

http://bethematch.org/HD/FAQs-about-uncommon-HLA-types/

But they don't release specifics, which is a bummer. It'd be interesting to find out more. I never know what to tell people to get me for gifts, perhaps a profile would be a nice gift.

The NatGeo kit costs more than 23andme, are you getting anything extra for the higher cost?

ETA: This is a really interesting comparison, http://www.isogg.org/wiki/Autosomal_DNA_testing_comparison_chart
 
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The VA did a DNA test on me when I went in for a basic checkup and then later wanted me to participate in some sort of program related to it, but I was never given the actual results of it. I'm sort of wondering whether I can get access to them. I suspect I can, but they didn't automatically send them to me.

I'm not sure what there is to know that I don't know already; Mostly German with a smattering of Welsh (known from my surname) Irish (a great grandmother) and some sort of Native American (another great grandmother was half native)... Schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, heart disease and diabetes (not to mention red hair) run in the family, and I personally already have psoriasis.

...so what possible good news could I get from it?
 
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I detect a lot of feeling here that sending in your DNA and getting back an analysis of your Chromosome-Y or mitochondrial lineage tells a significant amount about "where you came from". This is not so. Consider:

We have available to us just the two pathways into the past - your father's father's father's ... line or your mother's mother's mother's ... line. Assuming your service uses Y-Chromosome analysis (they could use either, but very rarely both), going back to just those three generations before you, you had 8 great grandparents, yet the analysis is only giving you information about the heritage of one of them, and then only one side of it. Your mother's patrilineacy is lost (unless you can get her to have her genome done as well) and the same for the other 7 grandparents. All you know is where your father's father's father's.... chromosomes; all female connections are lost. Your father's mother may have derived from Australia through Polynesia through the Hawaiian Islands, with sailor blood thrown in, but that is all lost in the analysis. This is a built-in part of the analysis; better analysis cannot overcome the problem; only resurrecting each ancestor and likewise sequencing them.

(BTW, I was very slippery using "getting a genome done". By no means is your entire genome analyzed, in the sense that J Craig Ventor's or Steve Jobs' was, or the fellow discovered in the cave in Spain in the news last week. It would not have helped the problem I cite above, in any case. You get some markers of interest to the organization discerned, and that is it. See Personal genomicsWP and Whole genome sequencingWP.)

Now, of course it is not all lost to the organization which you applied to; they could flesh that out, but it would, of course, be a huge hassle and invade privacy of other customers and so on. So while you're not being lied to by NatGeo or 23 and me, you are not getting anything like a complete picture. Treat the analysis like you would one of this "heritage books" you can buy that tells you all about your name.

This is not to say that the other analysis of your personal genome is not valid; you can find out abut the genetic problems (and blessings) that await you, providing the service actually does that correctly. That's a different ball of wax.
 
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shadron said:
I detect a lot of feeling here that sending in your DNA and getting back an analysis of your Chromosome-Y or mitochondrial lineage tells a significant amount about "where you came from". This is not so.
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Yes 23andMe tests 3089 Y-chromosome markers, 26,087 X-chromosome markers, and 2737 mitochondrial DNA markers, but they test a total of 967,000 markers, so they test a lot more than just the above.
 
shadron said:
I detect a lot of feeling here that sending in your DNA and getting back an analysis of your Chromosome-Y or mitochondrial lineage tells a significant amount about "where you came from". This is not so. Consider:

We have available to us just the two pathways into the past - your father's father's father's ... line or your mother's mother's mother's ... line. Assuming your service uses Y-Chromosome analysis (they could use either, but very rarely both), going back to just those three generations before you, you had 8 great grandparents, yet the analysis is only giving you information about the heritage of one of them, and then only one side of it. Your mother's patrilineacy is lost (unless you can get her to have her genome done as well) and the same for the other 7 grandparents. All you know is where your father's father's father's.... chromosomes; all female connections are lost. Your father's mother may have derived from Australia through Polynesia through the Hawaiian Islands, with sailor blood thrown in, but that is all lost in the analysis. This is a built-in part of the analysis; better analysis cannot overcome the problem; only resurrecting each ancestor and likewise sequencing them.
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That's why they don't restrict it to just using those two little bits as if all those other chromosomes didn't exist.
 
RussDill said:
Yes 23andMe tests 3089 Y-chromosome markers, 26,087 X-chromosome markers, and 2737 mitochondrial DNA markers, but they test a total of 967,000 markers, so they test a lot more than just the above.
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OK. The Y-Chromosome and mitochondrial markers are, respectively, the patrilineal and matrilineal lines. The other markers, in the X-chromosome, may have come from any of your ancestors - any of the 1024 at the tenth generation back, or may of the million+ at the twentieth generation. So, what exactly do those markers tell you? If you had a way to discover which ancestor it was, you might be able to say something; shoot, you might have potentially inherited that marker from 40% of your ancestors, or 80%, and there is no way to tell. That this or that characteristic on the X-Chromosome can down from one of your ancestors - no hint through which one, just any; at the million ancestor level, most likely more than one. The reason they have X-Chromosome markers checked is for specific reasons about your genome - your ability to develop som,e disease, or resistance to another - nothing about your ancestry, because they cannot get descriptive about it.

Right now, there are only three sorts of analysis on your own genome that can say anything about your ancestry - your patrilineal Y-Chromosome analysis, your matrilineal mitochondrial DNA analysis, and a third analysis, "autosomal mapping", that can show you roughly the amount of European, African and native American stock you have in your tree (obviously of most use to Americans, and I suppose it could be adopted to others). That's it.

If you'd like to see a rather cute, but factual opinion by an expert, look at .
 
Yes, I was sampled a few years ago as part of a programme at my SO's university.
 
Actually, the real hilarity would ensue if someone were to get back results showing 70% or so Neanderthal ancestry.
 
Delvo said:
That's why they don't restrict it to just using those two little bits as if all those other chromosomes didn't exist.
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True, but they aren't informative about your roots, either, other than in a very general way (see my remarks about autosomal mapping on the page just above). Having a particular marker (or its absence) in the 3rd gene may have been inherited from anyone of your ancestors (which number in the millions when you go back only as far as the beginning of the 19th century), so you have virtually no information on those ancestors (like what their ethnicity was), and even if you did, it would be a rat's nest of ancestral percentages, as is everyone's.

"All those other chromosomes" are non-specific; they could have come from any of your ancestors.

Delvo said:
My mother did. The service was on sale for a reduced price at the time, and we're waiting for that to happen again to do mine.

Her original last name was English/Irish and her family traced themselves back to England. So DNA associated with England, along with maybe some from the rest of the British islands and/or northern Europe, would have been no surprise. And that's mostly what she got. But she also turned out to have a roughly 16% contribution (a bit under 5/32, so the equivalent of 5/8 of one grandparent) from Italy or southern France.
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I don't mean to pick on your mother here, but that analysis shows only where her matrilineal and patrilineal lines came from. She might have had ancestors from China, or West Africa (or anywhere, really) which don't show up because they aren't in those two lines, but they are real, nonetheless, and possibly overwhelmingly represented.
 
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Some of these university databases end up with weird connections.

They dug up a 9k BP skelton near Cheddar England and got a DNA run on and for laughs tried for a match.

Sure enough up popped one in the registry....direct descendant and living not far from the escavation site. :boggled:

Talk about "stay at home" lineage.....no furrin travel for that line. Needless to say the guy was astonished to "meet" his long ago ancestor.....tho certainly not far away. ;)

Cool story in detail here
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread442612/pg1

9000 years ago the young man lay painfully dying, he lapsed into unconsciousness and death. I wonder how he would have felt to know that his descendants would survive and still be living within a mile of his resting place
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:jaw-dropp
 
Sampled, but so far as I know, never tested. (Fortunately, there has, as yet, been no need to identify my remains.)
 
shadron said:
OK. The Y-Chromosome and mitochondrial markers are, respectively, the patrilineal and matrilineal lines. The other markers, in the X-chromosome, may have come from any of your ancestors - any of the 1024 at the tenth generation back, or may of the million+ at the twentieth generation. So, what exactly do those markers tell you? If you had a way to discover which ancestor it was, you might be able to say something; shoot, you might have potentially inherited that marker from 40% of your ancestors, or 80%, and there is no way to tell. That this or that characteristic on the X-Chromosome can down from one of your ancestors - no hint through which one, just any; at the million ancestor level, most likely more than one. The reason they have X-Chromosome markers checked is for specific reasons about your genome - your ability to develop som,e disease, or resistance to another - nothing about your ancestry, because they cannot get descriptive about it.
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I don't see the significance about the ambiguity of "who it was". In most cases, people don't "know who" most members of their patrilineal or matrilineal lines "were" either; most of your ancestors would be people you knew nothing else about to connect with their genes anyway. They're just people who had some of the same genes.

In any case, while a single gene (or Y chromosome or mitochondrial genome) is inherited from a single individual in each generation, the advantage of including lots of units that are free to recombine with each other is exactly the mixing you're talking about; it tells about the overall gene pool(s) you came from, which a single non-recombining genetic unit inherited from an individual in each generation can not do.

shadron said:
Right now, there are only three sorts of analysis on your own genome that can say anything about your ancestry - your patrilineal Y-Chromosome analysis, your matrilineal mitochondrial DNA analysis, and a third analysis, "autosomal mapping", that can show you roughly the amount of European, African and native American stock you have in your tree (obviously of most use to Americans, and I suppose it could be adopted to others). That's it.
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Actually, no, the scale of resolution is much smaller than that, allowing identification of distinctions among multiple smaller groups within a given race or country.

shadron said:
"All those other chromosomes" are non-specific; they could have come from any of your ancestors.
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Of course. That's exactly the point!

shadron said:
I don't mean to pick on your mother here, but that analysis shows only where her matrilineal and patrilineal lines came from.
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No. That's simply not how it works at all.

You can see this for yourself quite easily if you look at the percentages being reported by these services. With a Y-chromosomal or mitochondrial haplogroup, you are 100% a member of one group, and 0% a member of any other group. Just like with any single gene on any other chromosome: you have it, or you don't; no state between 0 and 1 exists. But the results involve things like 16% matches. That is clearly impossible with just Y chromosomes and mitochondria; you can't get 16% of one of those from one source and 23% from another source and the remaining 61% from another source. That is only possible with a large number of separate bits of DNA. For example, it's what you'd get if they tested a million sites and found 160000 of yours matched one population, 230000 matched another population, and 610000 matched another.
 
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