Recent News Articles

Ancestry Will Tell You Which Genetics Came From Which Parent

13 Apr 2022 5:31 PM | Anonymous

According to an article by Nicole Wetsman and published in The Verge web site:

"Consumer genetics and genealogy company Ancestry announced a new feature, called SideView, that will give customers information about which bits of their DNA — and which parts of their ethnicity — were inherited from each parent. The tool can do that without having genetic information from the parents, which Ancestry says is a first in the industry."

"Genetic information is packaged in pairs of chromosomes, and each parent contributes one copy of most chromosomes. DNA analysis, though, reads the sequence of genetic information without sorting out which half different sections came from. Usually, the best way to sort that out is by comparing sections to the DNA of one or both parents. But Ancestry developed a technique that uses the company’s large DNA database — which includes 20 million people’s genetic information — to find overlaps between each user and cousins or distant relatives also in the system. It uses those overlaps to sort each section of DNA by which parent it was inherited from."

The article also cautions:

"The database, though, is largely made up of people with European ancestry — the feature is less accurate for users who have other ancestry from other parts of the world, according to a scientific article from Ancestry describing the technique. The paper has not yet been peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal. Blind spots around people of color are a longstanding bias in genetic databases and genetic research more generally. DNA tests like Ancestry’s that tie your genetics back to a particular ethnicity are also often criticized for giving people an incomplete picture of what genetic heritage actually means and conflating ancestry with race."

Also:

"Ancestry can have 95 percent precision for 90 percent of customers."

You can read more at: https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/13/23021782/ancestry-dna-sort-genes-parents-ethnicity.


Comments

  • 14 Apr 2022 8:32 AM | Anonymous
    I haven't looked at the "new" offering yet but I have had to make changes to what shows up in the mapping of TruLines. Now, it could be just that they get confused because of my 75% Irish heritage (on paper anyway at the grandparent level) but since Ancestry doesn't show me with any "French" genetics-although it does show my elder daughter with 6% "French" and there is nothing in my wife's side (other than broadly western Europe overshadowed by mostly being "Russian") I have to wonder at the algorithm and data-set choices. Sigh.
    Link  •  Reply

Blog posts

Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter









































Powered by Wild Apricot Membership Software