Has anybody here had a DNA test done?

Jokester said:
My dad had it done, they then offered him an improved version a few years later. Came back with completely different results :cry:
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This is my worry, a bit like when these people have Coats of Arms done.
My mate collected five different ones for his surname :)

Mind you I've been watching a series called Cold Cases dealing with cases from 60 years ago and on at least a couple they have put a note to come back in five years when DNA testing has improved.
 
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I did 23andme but it was underwhelming.

Was expecting some high-level links back thousands of years.

Instead got current-level links to countries with people who share same DNA.

They weren't even accurate. They got the "most likely" country wrong. There was no specifics.

Also if you're gonna do it don't use your real name.
 
SexyGreyFox said:
This is my worry, a bit like when these people have Coats of Arms done.
My mate collected five different ones for his surname :)

Mind you I've been watching a series called Cold Cases dealing with cases from 60 years ago and on at least a couple they have put a note to come back in five years when DNA testing has improved.
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I think those two scenarios are very different, though. A criminal investigation will be looking for a specific things, such as a match or partial match with an existing sample from someone else. The "come back when DNA testing has improved" is probably about the sample not being testable with current tech. Commercial "You are x% from country Y" testing is about businesses looking for ways to get people to give the business their DNA samples for the business to use for profit and to pay the business for the "privilege". The results don't mean much. They certainly don't mean what many people think they mean. The businesses involved are very careful about not explicitly claiming that they do.
 
Yes. Came up with an unexpected half-brother. Then got my known half-brother to test, and found out my dad is not my dad.
Luckily I hadn't spoken with him for around 30 years, so nothing of value was lost.
My mam can't/won't tell me anything useful about who my dad is (new half-brother has no idea either), but I can take a pretty good guess that he is probably Scottish.
 
Ive done a ancestry DNA test. Nothing too unusual came back. I definitely have some Jewish on my mum's side of the family, apparently this might be what's showing up as the Germanic part in my DNA. The results also regularly change due to updates to their technology in the background.

I'm currently showing as

59% England and North West Europe
13% Wales
12% Scotland
8% Sweden & Denmark
4% Germanic Europe
3% Norway
1% North African
 
branddaly said:
Yes. Came up with an unexpected half-brother. Then got my known half-brother to test, and found out my dad is not my dad.
Luckily I hadn't spoken with him for around 30 years, so nothing of value was lost.
My mam can't/won't tell me anything useful about who my dad is (new half-brother has no idea either), but I can take a pretty good guess that he is probably Scottish.
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Well that just took the thread in an interesting direction.

Also, I am intrigued by your intuition about your father:

but I can take a pretty good guess that he is probably Scottish
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Does it explain why you have you always deep fried your food and been attracted to tartan?
 
when 23 and me 1st set off our entire company was offered a freebie mini test for fun. it wasnt the full beans ... I think they just looked for 6 different markers and we could choose them.

I can't remember what I picked aside from having the gene which gives a very strong natural immunity to norovirus. .... and true enough so far (touch wood) I have never had it despite it ripping through my team at least twice

on a serious note. (I am biased as I work in genetic medicine) I hope soon we routinely start taking a full genome sequence of every baby at birth. yes there are a few sticky privacy issues but imo the huge advantages to health, personalised medicine as well as helping fight crime more than make up for that imo

(my view is that privacy was so last century so may as well take the advantages of having a society where much is known about me)

edit just to be clear I don't work for 23 and me, or have anything to do with them, it was just something they offered us when they were still setting up as we work in annotating genes on the genome.
 
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It's not surprising the results change over time, more and more people get added to the databases so there's a bigger pool from which to calculate results.

Plus some countries input will be limited as, for example, DNA testing for the public like this is illegal in some places like France. There won't be as much information coming from there.
 
SexyGreyFox said:
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Ah, okay, so he's talking about mitochondrial DNA there, and specifically mitochondrial haplogroups.

To quickly explain for others who might not know: mitochondria are vital parts of every cell in your body, with major responsibility for energy generation. They have their own (but tiny) genome and are passed exclusively along the female line. Unlike the rest of your DNA which is a mixture of the genes from parents, the DNA in your mitochondria comes only from your mother and thus passes mostly unchanged along from grandmother to mother to child. Also, because you have around one hundred mitochondria in every cell of your body and each mitochondrium contains multiple copies of this DNA it is particularly easy to reconstruct from ancient DNA (i.e. from skeletons recovered from the past) and particularly cheap and easy to sequence from living people. All this means that we have particularly good data on how mitochondrial DNA has changed, diverged and been passed down through time. Because it is passed only down the female line it also forms nicely branching trees and the different mitochondrial sequences can be grouped into "haplotypes" defined by the mutations present, people with the same haplotype are referred to as having the same "haplogroup".

What the guy in the clip is talking about here is that the two women share a particular haplogroup (I couldn't read the text on the screen in that clip, but I think he's talking about L0?), that haplogroup branched off from the other haplogroups still found in the human population particularly early - some 200,000 years ago. But, of course, that's only referring to a number of mutations accumulated in that haplogroup; most of the DNA present in the mitochondrial DNA is the same between everyone and goes back much, much further than 200,000 years.

Incidentally, he also slightly misspeaks (or oversimplifies) when he's talking about Mitochondrial Eve. Mitochondrial Eve is not the most recent common ancestor of all humanity; she is the most recent common ancestor traced exclusively by the female line. The most recent common ancestor is far more recent, probably in the last ten thousand years or sooner.
 
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