23andMe Phase 3…A Family Affair
Well…a lot has happened since I last blogged about my 23andMe results. To start, my parents and sister also received their results, which is pretty neat, because we are able to share profiles on the 23andme site, much you can on social networks like MySpace or Facebook. Next, I found out that I am actually not from the Far East. More on that later. Last, there is inbreeding in my family. To quote my great-grandfather who married his sister-in-law, “I didn’t raise my daughters to marry strangers.”
What’s cool about being able to have “friends” on 23andMe is that my parents, sister and myself can compare our genomes. I can click on each of the traits in the gene journal (sprinter’s gene, bitter taste, body mass index, cancer, etc.), and a tree will appear that ranks each of my family members in increasing similarity to me. For example, when we compare weight/body mass index, I am related closest to my sister with 90.6% similarity, followed by my mother with 85.41%, and then my father, with 82.52% similarity. I also threw my brother-in-law in there as a friend, so it’s interesting to see that I had 81.2% similarity to him, someone I am not related to.
If you recall in my last post, my “ancestry” section said that I had the highest markers in the Far East, meaning that’s where I originated. Well, I thought it was strange, but I accepted the fact that there could be blonde-haired, blue-eyed Asians out there, and perhaps I was one of them. Recently, I went back to the ancestry section and behold! I am now from Sardinia! Since I have a close connection to 23andMe, I asked my brother-in-law what was going on. He made a few phone calls and found out that some of the site’s algorithms were incorrect, therefore giving out misinformation, but they had been since corrected This opens up a whole other can of worms and makes me wonder what other mistakes they made. How credible is this site? Or just like any other start-up product or service, it might just be in semi-perpetual beta. Seems like when it’s my chromosomes at stake here, they should be a little more careful…
Oh, yes…then there’s the incest. Simply, when I look at both my parents’ genomes in family inheritance and compare, there is a string common to both of them that is navy blue, signifying complete identity. For comparison, when I look at my genome, in this spot there is light blue, signifying half-identity, because they are my parents and I am half-identical to each of them. This means that they have descended from a common person or people.
So that’s the latest on 23andMe — new things keep popping up on the site — and Exclamation readers will be the first to know!
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