New Version of atDNA 7.0 with Best Euro Results
Announcing New Version of atDNA 7.0 with Best Available Euro Results
DNA Consultants is pleased to announce a new version of its database with the DNA testing industry’s only country-specific matches for European ancestry. The current state of the database atDNA 7.0, like previous versions, was made possible by the work of its statistics staff in adapting published STR (short tandem repeat) frequencies in forensic science literature. It is used in fulfillment of the DNA Fingerprint Plus family of products, exclusively developed and available only through DNA Consultants.
The EURO section now covers virtually all countries of Europe, unlike other DNA tests, which do not break down one’s European ancestry by country, only regions. A EURO DNA Fingerprint Test (price: $99) gives customers the Top Ten European countries in which they likely have ancestry based on a comparison of their unique DNA profile with the allele frequencies or variations reported for national samples from 39 countries.
Previous customers may update their EURO results with the Special EURO Update ($50). If you received EURO results before July 2014 you may order this upgrade.
New customers may order either the stand-alone EURO or a new comprehensive DNA Fingerprint Plus, which includes EURO results along with all the other analyses.
A typical result from the $99 EURO DNA test is:
Rank | European Population Matches |
1 | Scotland – Highlands (n = 228) |
2 | England/Wales (n = 437) |
3 | Netherlands (n = 231) |
4 | Finland (n = 230) |
5 | Estonia (n = 150) |
6 | Belgium – Flemish (n = 231) |
7 | Scotland – Lowlands (n = 494) |
8 | Romania (n=243) |
9 | Northern Ireland (n = 207) |
10 | Portugal (n = 150) |
“Most Americans who take a DNA test are curious, first and foremost, about their European ancestries,” said Donald Yates, Principal Investigator. “Many have been frustrated with vagueness and apparent inaccuracies in their past experiences with testing.”
“The new EURO test cuts to the chase by relying sheerly on population statistics and is the only method to compare the consumer with actual contemporary European nationals, not with biased data mostly from U.S. customers or medical studies.” Yates said. “All other methods on the market employ microarray genotyping that involves heuristics or guesswork, theoretical correlations and complicated logarithms.”
According to a review of “EURO DNA Testing” just published on the DNA Consultants Blog, there was a strong correlation between English, Scottish and other surnames tabulated in fifth generation genealogy records and the relative rank of European nationalities reported by the EURO DNA Fingerprint Test. For instance, the greatest number (34%) of the subject’s 3rd-great-grandparents bore Scottish surnames. One grandmother was a McDonald whose forebears came from the Isle of Skye. The population named Scotland – Highlands emerged as the Number 1 country of ancestral origin. Highlands Scotland was followed by England/Wales, the second largest source of surnames. England/Wales was in turn followed by Netherlands (13% of surnames were Dutch in origin, with another grandmother bearing a Dutch surname).
Although restricted to countries of Europe, the new EURO DNA Test can even be used indirectly to verify American Indian admixture since important studies last year have confirmed that Europeans and Native Americans share a significant degree of deep ancestry.[1] EURO results listing a high rank for Finland or Estonia in northeast Europe appear to reflect a real measure of ancestry in the so-called Ancient North Eurasians (ANE) that contributed to the peopling of Europe in a minor way during the Stone Age and left their genetic signature most distinctly in Finland, Estonia and parts of Russia.
The prevailing autosomal methods, based on 800,000 SNPs, once reported ANE segments accurately as Finno-Ugric ancestry, but current versions have “corrected” these results. “It’s a case of theory getting ahead of practice,” said Yates. “A lot of people’s ‘false Finnish’ results, based on forensic casework, are real.”
“Do You Know Your European Origins?”
“Destination Europe”
[1] Lazaridis, I. et al., “Ancient Human Genomes Suggest Three Ancestral Populations for the Present-day Europeans.” Nature513/7518{2014):409-13 (known as the Reich article after David Reich of the Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School); A. Seguin-Orlando et al., “Genomic Structure in Europeans Dating Back at Least 36,200 years,” Science 346/6213 (2014):1113-1118 (known as the Willerslev study after Eske Willerslev of Centre for GeoGenetics, Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen).