![]() Your results from one company can even change over time as the company signs up more users, and gathers more data. What’s not always obvious from these reports is that they’re based on estimates that can vary from company to company, and have built-in sources of error. MyHeritage, another company that provides ancestry analysis, writes “our DNA test offers you the powerful experience of discovering what makes you unique and learning where you really come from.” In its ancestry reports, 23andMe says “your DNA tells the story of who you are, and how you’re connected to populations around the world.” The company is now even partnering with AirBnb to help customers plan “heritage” vacations in places where their ancestors lived. They also market their product in a way that suggests their test reveals something deeply meaningful about you. They might say, for example, someone’s ancestry is 25 percent Italian, 74 percent East Asian, and 0.1 percent Sardinian. The companies that provide ancestry testing, like and 23andMe, deliver the precise ancestral breakdown of their customers’ DNA. They have more to do with the limitations of the science and some key assumptions companies make when analyzing DNA for ancestry. So what accounts for these differences? Overall, discrepancies in ancestry testing don’t mean that genetic science is a fraud, and that the companies are just making up these numbers. One computational biologist told the CBC that the differences in the results were “mystifying.” ![]() What’s more, when the twins had their DNA tested by five companies, each one gave them different results. In one instance, the consumer genetics company 23andMe told one twin she was 13 percent “Broadly European.” The other twin’s test, meanwhile, showed she had just 3 percent “Broadly European” ancestry, and had more DNA matched to other, more specific regions in Europe. And across the industry, estimates of where an individual’s ancestors lived can differ significantly from company to company. ![]() In fact, the journalists demonstrated that twins don’t often get the same results from a single company. Not necessarily, according to a recent investigation by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. So you’d think if a set of twins both sent in a DNA sample for genetic ancestry testing, they’d get the exact same results, right? Identical twins have virtually identical DNA.
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