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Identical Twins Test 5 DNA Ancestry Kits, Get Different Results On Each (www.cbc.ca)
Freshly Exhumed writes: Uh-oh, something is not right with the results of most popular DNA ancestry kits, as a pair of identical twins have found. Charlsie Agro and her twin sister, Carly, bought home kits from AncestryDNA, MyHeritage, 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA and Living DNA, and mailed samples of their DNA to each company for analysis. Despite having virtually identical DNA, the twins did not receive matching results from any of the companies. "The fact that they present different results for you and your sister, I find very mystifying," said Dr. Mark Gerstein, a computational biologist at Yale University. Gerstein's team analyzed the results, and he asserts that any results the Agro twins received from the same DNA testing company should have been identical. The raw data collected from both sisters' DNA is nearly exactly the same. "It's shockingly similar," he said.
Clearly, one of them was switched at birth. With their triplet.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
They should be identical. Will not be due to normal error. Or may not be even close due to incompetence.
What is the point of the identical twins (other than adding click-bait value)? Why not submit two samples from the same person under different names?
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
They're IDENTICAL twins, right? Why would their DNA be "virtually" the same? Why would there be ANY level of shock with that? ELI5 please.
Because, for each test, there are some SNPs that the lab is unable to determine ("no-calls"). But these are going to be different for each individual, and in fact for each test an individual takes.
There also are likely to be a very small number of SNPs that are simply read incorrectly.
Because of these two issues, the raw results for the two identical twins will almost certainly not be the same -- although the results would have been identical if they had been able to get (correct) results for every single SNP.
...are the professional forensic kits that law enforcement use as bad as this?
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Some people don't realize that none of these services sequence the full genome. They sequence a collection of different sites as best they can (from the spit that you send them in a tube). Some sites will be sequenced really well and some not at all; it is the random nature of the system. What happens if twin 1 is sequenced really well at site ABC123 and has some rare mutation there but twin 2 is not sequenced at that site at all? They will assume that twin does not have the mutation - they will sub in "wild type" sequence at that locus as they won't have any thing better to go on - and you'll end up identifying them as being different. Take this many times over thousands of gene loci that they sequence and pretty soon you see how two identical twins can end up looking very different.
If you want to see how similar they really are at the DNA level, you need Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) or at least you need to know what the coverage was at each locus for each twin. The former still costs thousands in most cases, the latter should be in the raw data (though they would need to convince the companies to release said raw data to them).
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Since you forgot to drop any citations:
"western clawed frog, Xenopus tropicalis, has now been analysed by an international consortium of scientists from 24 institutions, and joins a list of sequenced model organisms including the mouse, zebrafish, nematode and fruit fly. What's most surprising, researchers say, is how closely the amphibian's genome resembles that of the mouse and the human, with large swathes of frog DNA on several chromosomes having genes arranged in the same order as in these mammals. The results of the analysis are published in Science this week1.
"There are megabases of sequence where gene order has changed very little since the last common ancestor" of amphibians, birds and mammals about 360 million years ago, says bioinformaticist Uffe Hellsten at the US Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California, a co-author on the study.
That close genomic relationship doesn't hold true for all vertebrates, he notes. The zebrafish genome, for example, shows a much different gene order."
Biologically we are all one big happy family : LIFE. Much of LIFE works very much the same way, be it cells, mitochondria, lung tissue or heart, muscle and bones, eating anf secretion, so no it really isnt that surprising to share DNA with other forms of LIFE as a whole.
Spying is big business. For example, spying is Google's main theme for which services to keep and which to do away with. Perhaps spying is driving these ancestry services as well. We already know these ancestry services share client data with police (1, 2, 3). Perhaps this data sharing is listed in the terms of service, but either way the sharing helps authorities augment their database and helps them perform more surveillance on ordinary citizens (most citizens don't commit crimes and therefore should not face such treatment; I'm not convinced those who commit crimes deserve this treatment but the vast majority of the public absolutely don't).
Digital Citizen
Hey, just just bought two nearly identical barometers from crap-o-mart for $5 each. I put them next to each other in the same room. Imagine my horror when I noticed that their respective readings differ by as much as 10%.
Oh, BTW, 23andme terms of service are clear, at least.
"The laboratory may not be able to process your sample, and the laboratory process may result in errors ... Even for processing that meets our high standards, a small, unknown fraction of the data generated during the laboratory process may be un-interpretable or incorrect (referred to as "Errors" ..."
Inexpensive direct to consumer DNA testing companies to not provide nor claim to provide results with statistically insignificant error rates. Don't we all already know this?
The results are good enough to do fun things like find previously unknown relatives. To date, I've found three second cousins using 23andme. My ancestry information was likely not perfect but was accurate enough for intended purposes.
I suspect if a reporter did submit samples under different names, a court would side with the press against their terms of service. Eventually.
But by using identical twins, you sidesteps the possibility of wasting time, effort, and money because your report has been tied up by a gag order while a court mulls over what to do.
I'm reminded of the opposite story: someone forgets their password to the DNA site, and (instead of resetting the password) creates another account, sends in new DNA... and later calls their kid saying that it's incredible, wonderful, this DNA site has found that I have an identical twin somewhere!
Not to worry. Will all be part of glorious Russian motherland soon.
Have gnu, will travel.
Of course, you'd have to read TFA to realize that ...
He read an identical copy of the article but it gave him different results.
Ezekiel 23:20