STUDY SHOWS CONSUMER DNA/ANCESTRY SITES ARE PRETTY MUCH A SCAM
A new study has found that direct-to-consumer genetic tests, like those marketed by 23andMe, Ancestry.com, Family Tree DNA, and MyHeritage, can be used to obtain innacurate results.
Lost in interpretation: Scientists at Ambry Genetics, a diagnostics company that also interprets data from consumer DNA tests, looked at this raw genotyping data from 49 people. They found that 40 percent of the variants noted in the raw data were false positives—that is, they indicated that a particular genetic variant was present when it wasn’t. Most of the false-positive calls were of cancer-linked genes. In eight instances, third-party interpretation services misunderstood the variants present.