Thread: Test to check origins, scam or some truth to it?

Today there are offers to check your genetic history and origins. I was just wondering if this can be pretty accurate or if these are simply scams, because Im certainly interested in taking one :P

What pros/cons does such tests have when it comes to the information they can give?

Originally Posted by Raziell

Today there are offers to check your genetic history and origins. I was just wondering if this can be pretty accurate or if these are simply scams, because Im certainly interested in taking one :P

What pros/cons does such tests have when it comes to the information they can give?

In my opinion I think there should be many ways of comparing different methods and ac-curacies of any phenomenon before definitively making the results conclusive. Finger printing, DNA, gene type, and other means of verification should be used.

DNA testing is a pretty well established and accurate procedure.

Originally Posted by Raziell

Today there are offers to check your genetic history and origins. I was just wondering if this can be pretty accurate or if these are simply scams, because Im certainly interested in taking one :P

What pros/cons does such tests have when it comes to the information they can give?

Researchers can track your genetic history and pinpoint the region where you live and where your ancestors lived, so it is not a scam.
If they do not use SPA (SPatial Ancestry analysis) nor GPS (Geographic Population Structure), then you should not take them.

GPS, which was described and tested a few weeks ago in Nature Communications (Elhaik, E. et al., 2014), will not yet be used.
The paper is technical and quite large, so this news article from the University of Sheffield gives a simplified explanation about that new tool.

Thanks for the replies. I'll try it out when I can afford it then

My assumption is that it is quite accurate as your genetic material is compared with that of other nationalities that have spread around the world. This is why in every human's DNA, we will see at least minor genes that are similar to that of African's being that we have all descended from families in Africa (whether it is immediate or millennia)