Lower Your Expectations For Genetic Ethnicity Estimates

Ancestry, 23andMe, and the limitations of DNA arrays

Principal component analysis of European genetic populations obtained by Illumina sequencing. Nelis et al. PLoS One 2009 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0005472 CC BY 2.5

DNA testing for genealogy was introduced almost 25 years ago, at the height of the Human Genome Project. It started with mitochondrial and Y chromosome DNA testing, but sequencing was, and is, very expensive and multi-generational comparisons weren’t possible. FamilyTreeDNA started…