None of the differences, either split by company or by twin seem egregious or even particularly unsatisfactory. They cite that AncestryDNA measured each of their DNA to be 99.6% similar, and really, that seems like the error rate you would about expect for the Ancestry results they got. They got the exact same regions and only a percentage point or two off in each region's share.<p>It's not like they're fully sequencing every DNA sample they get.<p>> AncestryDNA found the twins have predominantly Eastern European ancestry (38 per cent for Carly and 39 per cent for Charlsie). But the results from MyHeritage trace the majority of their ancestry to the Balkans (60.6 per cent for Carly and 60.7 per cent for Charlsie).<p>This part of the article especially seems like hair splitting considering the Balkans and Eastern Europe tend to have a lot of overlap. In fact, "Balkans" in particular is an extremely ambiguous linguistic term and can mean so many different things to so many people.
You don't need twins for this test. A single person can just sign up twice for these services and get different results, even if they make a single sample and split it between the two vials.<p>I thought it was pretty well known that these services are estimates only to a large degree? These services only take samples, they don't sequence the entire genome. Of course there will be errors when you have to extrapolate from a sample.<p>Even for me personally, my results changed when my parents did it and linked up to me, because their results were able to flow into mine.
> Lack of oversight<p>> Despite the popularity of ancestry testing, there is absolutely no government or professional oversight of the industry to ensure the validity of the results.<p>> It's a situation Gravel finds troubling.<p>What is up with this incessant clamoring for a nanny to supervise every little thing?<p>This is published on a page where, thanks to "oversight", I have to click a little spam box warning that this page, like every other damn website on the internet, uses cookies. No thank you. I really don't want to pay more taxes for the Central Bureau of Making Sure You Know You Might Be 7% Less Eastern European than Your DNA Test Indicates.
Semi-related: I was thinking about getting one of the newer iWatches, the one with the heart-rate monitoring and all that jazz. To me, those features are really cool and future-y. So, I waltz on down to the store and try one on. It reads my heart-rate and it seems to be fairly accurate. Ok, well, let's test it a bit. I start running in place. The heart rate goes up. I then just stand there, after a bit, the heart-rate goes down. Nice, the thing actually works! Well, they had a few of the iWatches sitting there, without anyone else taking a poke at them. So, I strap all the free ones on the arm.<p>Well, they all gave different readings. I repeated the running in place test. Some went up and down much more than the others; maybe 10 bpm more. I tried re-arranging them on my arm and doing the running in place test again, you know, maybe it only works on the wrist since the blood is closer to the surface there? Nope, the readings were all over the place still. It was not super scientific of me. I mean, I was some strange person running in place in a store with a bunch of iWatches strapped to my arm.<p>Maybe the watches have some sort of learning algo in them that was getting messed up with all the folks trying them on. Maybe I was wearing them 'wrong'. Maybe I should have waited 10 minutes between jogging sessions. I don't know.<p>But, to me, these things have a <i>long</i> way to go. A lot of the bio-tech and bioengineering out there seems to be a bit of snake-oil right now. I really do want it all to work, I think that would be a great boon to us all [0]. If something like the iWatch can't give repeatable readings in nearly any way, then it's all just a gimmick and not useful.<p>[0] I mean, can you imagine if Theranos' tech actually did work?! That would change medicine for the better in incalculable ways. I can see why that company's plan was so intoxicating.
Disclaimer: I currently work for a genetics genealogy company mentioned in this article. My comments are my own. Some relevant previous comment threads of mine about other DNA related articles: [0], [1], [2], [3]<p>Personally, I would love to help create legislation aimed to protect consumers from perceived and actual problems related to DNA sequencing and analysis. I don't know <i>how</i> though and I fear it'd fall to the back burner in the current US political climate. Our customers are not only US but international though and that presents yet another dimension to the challenges therein.<p>This article states:<p>> <i>Whatever your ancestry results, don't get too attached to them. They could change.</i><p>That is absolutely correct. I've stated why in a previous comment [1]; <i>Some DNA analysis software employ stochastic algorithms. That means that the answer they provide can be different if run more than once</i>.<p>The article also states:<p>> <i>Despite the popularity of ancestry testing, there is absolutely no government or professional oversight of the industry to ensure the validity of the results.</i><p>That is also correct. I've heard peers state that the industry isn't regulated outside of the field of medicine during product discussions. I think that's something which needs to be addressed: leaving it unaddressed can encourage predatory business behavior.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18196717" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18196717</a>
[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18196984" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18196984</a>
[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18564380" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18564380</a>
[3] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18569659" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18569659</a>
I wouldn't mind paying a fair sum for a service that would:<p>(1) reasonably guarantee that my data not only won't be distributed - but will be destroyed (on their side) within a short time frame<p>(2) give me access to all of the raw data and methodologies used in their analysis<p>Does anyone know of such a service?
Misleading headline in my opinion...<p>Carly's results have a larger 'Broadly European' percentage, but that is a catchall that includes: Italian, Eastern European, Balkan, French & German, Iberian (Others category), and Broadly Southern European (Others category). Therefore Carly's 'Broadly European' traits could be used to match Charlsie's results.<p>It is unfair to call the 23andMe results 'different'. They are getting the same results, however one twin is getting more specificity.
Their results seem well within the margin of error I'd expect out of a $100 DNA sequencing service. It's incredible that this kind of thing is now available at this price point.
The great thing is that their dnas were shockingly similar. It means the sequncing is valid. Now the ancestry composition thing is known to be a nonstandard procedure , just look at their research publications.
Not surprised. Some consumer DNA testing companies can't even tell when the DNA submitted isn't human: <a href="https://www.nbcchicago.com/investigations/home-dna-kits-481292431.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nbcchicago.com/investigations/home-dna-kits-4812...</a>
99.6% is still awfully dissimilar, depending on what that number means. Thinking about single polymorphisms, of ca. 3 billion bases, that is still 120,000,000 SNPs between twins. Of course, they aren't doing full genome sequencing, and they are probably targeting loci that are know to be more divergent. Still... that similarity seems awfully low for twins. I wonder what they typically find for similarity between any two individuals. I also wonder if their lab is a little disorganized....
Translating into IT / tech terms, people are VERY used to the concept of two .wav files sampled from the same CDrom being bit identical and useful in a court of law to prove both .wav files came from exactly the same music cd.<p>However people are really worked up about a new online service that encodes multiple analog music sources into lossy mp3 samples using different analog encoders each time, and the service sells an "identify matches similar to this song" as a service that people think is the same level of exactness as the old fashioned court-of-law .wav file bit by bit comparisons, but its actually more of a lossy best guess pattern matching service instead. Yes they DO use the same general technology, mostly, but its quite different in purpose and outcome.<p>An even better analogy is we are VERY used to an online service that OCRs a scan of a music CD and outputs the musician name every time based on OCR of the disc itself, and now people familiar with that technology are VERY confused by an app that listens to your cell phone mic and often squirts out the musician name based on that raw analog sound sample.<p>Its more a miracle the new tech works at all, than a scandal that both business models aren't identical in accuracy.
I wonder why they didn't mention male microchimerism, a still poorly understand phenomenon, in which male DNA is found in females. Possible sources of gene transfer are " unrecognized spontaneous abortion, vanished male twin, an older brother transferred by the maternal circulation, or sexual intercourse"<p><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16084184/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16084184/</a><p><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3458919/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3458919/</a>
I'd like to get this done for myself and my parents (to distinguish where the different traits actually come from), but I'm a little wary of putting this sort of information out there when we don't know how it will be used in the future. And by whom.<p>Are there services that you can pay extra that will do a full DNA sequence and have access to 23andMe's comparison data?<p>Or am I being paranoid?
From the article (and the company themselves):<p>"The company said it approaches the development of its tools and reports with scientific rigour, but admits its results are "statistical estimates."<p>It is very likely that there's a fine print on their procedure that everything is a Guesstimate and while their algorithms will process things the same for every sample, there's just too much variations that are unaccounted for even in such controlled environments.<p>What would surprise me for example is if someone sent in their DNA for analysis twice on the same company and get varying results. That would mean that the process itself is not well-established.
DNA in Europe is all mixed up. A lot of this is due to the Romans. There were also a lot of other migrations and displacements.<p>I was watching a BBC documentary about how Rome influenced the history of Scotland. The announcer, who has a very pronounced Scottish accent, took a DNA ancestry test. The results (IIRC) indicated Germany, Italy, and eastern europe. (The announcer interpreted this last one as Dacia) Come to think of it, he doesn't look so different from Metatron.<p>The twin results not matching is kinda disturbing, though.
I can't get past the sub headline:
> Twins' DNA 'shockingly similar'<p>Identical twins are supposed to have identical DNA, right? Or did I really misunderstand a lot of school.
The twins DNA is "nearly exactly" the same is an oxymoron. Nearly is not an exact. The twins have "virtually identical" ancestry profiles yet, their profiles are "shockingly similar"<p>They are comparing a low resolution map the genome. The genome is 3+ billion nucleotides, only 700,000 (0.0002%) is being compared to find 0.04% difference! that is shockingly similar!
Techniques used to read DNA only read short segments, from which larger segments are inferred.<p>Not surprisingly, the results are not reliable.<p>Feed the unreliable result into any classification algorithm, and you still get unreliably results (actually I was expecting worse)<p>Not only that, but you only read small parts- SNPs. So there is no bijection; just a rough correspondence. On the bright side, it's good for privacy.
They really should have done the obvious quality control test: each of the twins should have done each DNA test several times, at least twice. Most comments seem to assume that the test samples were uncontaminated and that the sequencing was correct. Redundancy will help identify the source of the differences.
I don't know if any company provides that, but I would like to have access to my raw data (I guess, several Gbs worth or DNA pairs information) and use a different 3rd party of my choice for the analysis. (This way there would be a lot more competition for various ways to look at data).
TFA seems to be making a mountain out of a molehill to be sensationalist.<p>I don't think anybody's ever claimed this type of mail in test is 100% accurate, and most of the results were within a couple percentage points of each other.
What are the chances that these two people are not identical twins? i.e. fraternal. That could explain the differences in results from the same company. But they should also be quite trivially declared siblings in that case.
> According to the raw data from 23andMe, 99.6 per cent of those parts were the same<p>99.6% is hardly an impressive figure. I would expect 99.9999% between twins at least. Chimpanzees and humans already share about 96% of genes.<p><a href="https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/08/chimps-humans-96-percent-the-same-gene-study-finds/" rel="nofollow">https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/08/chimps-huma...</a>
This is a great reason why I won't get this test done. The math is bad and (genetically identical) twins getting different results shows how bad the science is right now.<p>This reminds me of when economics try to predict what the GDP will be next year. It's almost always wrong, so why would ever listen to anyone who is always wrong?<p>It's mostly a scam, in my opinion.
I got a question to all of the Americans here. Why do you all care so much where you come from? Why are these services so popular? I honestly am not interested in my origins. Perhaps because I'm from Europe?
I'm wondering what would happen if you'd send a GDPR request for deletion of personal data to such a DNA sequencing company. While you might not have sent them any of your DNA, relatives of you might have sent them theirs. Since DNA material can also be used to infer characteristics from close relatives, would DNA material of close relatives be considered personal data falling under the rules of GDPR?
This is one of those HN threads with a lot of misinformation by people who don't know the subject area well but have a strong opinion anyway.<p>It would be helpful if folks would state their credentials/experience with respect to the subject area in their comment.<p>Mine: none whatsoever, but am interested in reading informed discussions with folks with either credentials or experience in subject matter.