Comment by araneae | Hacker News Reader

Comment by araneae | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I found all of it interesting, but I'm a bio geek. I'm also planning to have kids with my fiancé so it's also cool because of that.

Some highlights:

Both my fiancé and I are carriers for a mild form of Hemochromatosis, so we have a 1/4 chance of having a kid with it.

I am a little bit Asian! That's probably the Jewish ancestry. My fiancé thought he had a black ancestor but it turns out was 100% European. My best friend, whose father had always told her that her grandmother was Native American, found out he was lying to her (which did not surprise but did disappoint her.) Also the heat map of where your mitochondria are from is fun; it confirmed what I knew already but it was still really cool to see that the first migration of my maternal line out of Greece was with my grandmother.

But that's really just the tip of the iceberg. Part of what makes 23andme so fun is you get to learn a lot about biology from the framework of your own genes. Each SNP they report on has a bunch of information associated with it. It's only boring if you aren't interested in biology.

That sounds cool. Can they tell you from which European ethnic groups you come from too? How specific are they about this? Do they say French, German, etc...? Or do they say South of France Celtic, Germanic tribe from the North and so on?

Right now the only categories where they give you your percentage and paint your genome accordingly are European, Asian, and African.

The cool thing about 23andme though is that they're always rolling out new stuff. There is a separate, more detailed ancestry break-down in their "labs" (a part of the website for experimental stuff) but it's not very good. Part of the problem is that there isn't enough research pinning down large swaths of the genome to more specific areas. So what 23andme does is use user reported data- which is problematic due to globalization and limited by people's knowledge.

The only other things that are good and can really pin down geography are your mitochondrial DNA, like I mentioned, and the Y chromosome.

Aaaah, not very useful for me then. I live in Europe and doubt that I have any Asian or African ancestry. Maybe some Middle-Eastern or Sephardic Jew but I guess that falls in the same race as Europeans so they won't be able to tell me. $260 was going to be a big investment for me, I will wait until they can tell the difference between early Europe's ethnic groups: Celts, Germanic tribes, Iberians, Basques, "Roman", etc... They need to study people living in Europe in kind of isolated communities, remote mountains or whatever, then they will be able to tell the difference.

And even then it may be hard. There has been mixing up even back then.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com