A few weeks ago I sent a saliva sample to be analyzed for genetic information. A few minutes ago I've received the initial results - more detailed analysis is coming in the next few weeks.
I have to say, the results are a bit uninteresting in their uniformity and don't hold any major surprises or mysteries. Or do they?
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| I do wonder what's this 0.1% unassigned. Martian? |
The above is the most speculative analysis of the results so far. A more conservative estimate put it at around 84% Ashkenazi, 14% broadly European and 1.1% unassigned. Being only 0.2% Middle Eastern is rather interesting and that 0.1% East Asian is also most curious. It couldn't have been too many contributes and probably a very long time ago, but still.
What I was also very interested to find, and am admittedly rather proud of, was that my genes are 2.6% Neanderthal (the European average is 2.7%).
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| Distant cousins everywhere! Useful for couch surfing on the next trip |
They got all that from saliva? How do they arrive at the percentages? Not scepticism, rather curiosity :-)
ReplyDeleteThe saliva contains enough material for DNA analysis. The speculative breakdown is estimated to be only around 50% accurate. The conservative (but less informative and interesting) estimation has a much higher probability to be correct (high 80% or above). The breakdown itself is based on the sample that they had in the beginning - people reporting information about where their ancestors came from and crossing that with their genetic information. So, they infer from the DNA that is typical for certain groups of people. This is an estimation, not 100% accurate, though given that people tended not to mix too much (especially with closed and probably religious communities in my case), it's probably correct for the most part.
DeleteThey got all that from saliva? How do they arrive at the percentages? Not scepticism, rather curiosity :-)
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