Rumbles from RootsTech
Lots of DNA developments are coming down the pike and RootsTech 2017 attendees got an eyeful and earful about — and sometimes a sneak peek at — what’s to come.
Let’s take it company by company and hit the highlights.
23andMe
Not much new in the way of announcements or developments from 23andMe but a sale price good through February 14th that’s enough to perhaps entice a few genealogists to think about testing here. The ancestry-only option is down from its usual $99 to just $79 plus shipping for the U.S. market.
That price should be available to anyone on the 23andMe website.
AncestryDNA
After blowing the bottom off the price point for tests with an in-person-attendee-only sale price of $49 for its autosomal test, AncestryDNA followed with the announcement by CEO Tim Sullivan that a new “DNA communities” feature will be rolled out to all users shortly.
The new feature is an additional layer of granularity on the ethnicity estimates, grouping test-takers into regional and localized communities based their DNA results. So, for example, instead of just Irish, a user might be told her DNA was consistent with a community of users from west Ireland, down to a county or even smaller level.
The new communities are the result of research done by the science team that was published recently in the peer-reviewed journal, Nature.
Family Tree DNA
Matching AncestryDNA with a show price of $49 for one day of RootsTech, Family Tree DNA also extended its regular show-sale prices to all users through February 18th. The autosomal Family Finder test is available for just $69 plus shipping and other test bundles are also available.
The coupon code for the autosomal test is (correction) PUTS10, for the YDNA tests LF3CG, and for the mtDNA test, use coupon code TBN2Y.
Living DNA
The newest entrant to the international DNA testing market is British-owned Living DNA. This company hopes to provide the most detailed ethnicity estimates on the market and has so far shown great promise with drilling down to local levels in its analysis of U.K. ethnicities.
Whether the company will succeed in extending its research to the European continent and to the highly-admixed U.S. with its melting-pot ethnic market is an open question, but the company shows promise and appears worth watching.
The $159 regular test price in the U.S. will include autosomal results plus YDNA and mtDNA results for males and mtDNA results for females.
And, yes, in the spirit of “I never met a DNA test I wouldn’t take,” The Legal Genealogist did swab… we’ll see how these folks do with my 50% admixed colonial American and 50% German ethnicity.
MyHeritage DNA
MyHeritage is also a new entrant to the DNA testing field, offering an autosomal DNA test only. The company began by allowing free uploads of raw data from other test companies with free matching as an incentive to build its database.
MyHeritage expects to offer detailed ethnicity estimates soon based on its unique Founder Population data collection and analysis, and announced at RootsTech that it had hired Columbia University’s Dr. Yaniv Ehrlich (of DNA Land) as its chief DNA science officer. Early beta results are available now, but will be greatly refined as analysis continues.
The upshot
What we’re seeing today in the DNA field is a veritable explosion in both the number of test takers and the number of test companies working to make DNA results more useful and more meaningful — or at least more entertaining.
The growth has been so dramatic, so exponential, that it’s often hard to remember that it hasn’t even been a decade since the very first autosomal tests became available and only a few years more than that when YDNA and mtDNA testing for genealogy began.
It’s an exciting time to be a genetic genealogist…
Sent from my iPad
You may wish to add that MyHeritage announced plans for a chromosome browser during a class available on RootsTech.org about their matching.
Nice summary!
I don’t expect a chromosome browser in 2017, but yes, MyHeritage CEO Gilad Japhet said at the MyHeritage luncheon that one would be forthcoming.
One concern is that the ever-increasing number of new companies jumping on the DNA bandwagon may end up dividing the results into more and more mutually-exclusive data pools and eventually impair our ability to find DNA matches simply because our unknown matches chose to test with a different company than we did. Even though competition among the different companies has driven the price of individual tests down, if it becomes necessary to test at four or five different companies (or.more), we’ll soon be back where we started with the cost of finding that unknown match becoming prohibitive. Five tests at $50-60 each still comes out to $250-300, yunnowhadduhmean?
Thanks for all the info! Autocorrect foiled you. Can you find it?
Yep, just did and fixed it. The autocorrect did that twice, and I found the first one but missed the second. Worse, in a first draft, something I typed had autocorrect making the Ancestry CEO have an entirely different last name than he really has. Sigh… 🙂
Let us know if you are impressed with the Living DNA results.
Maybe they have a bigger drill.
Can’t find the FTDNA sale on their website. How do we get it? Thanks.
Place an order using the coupon code. It should work.
What coupon code?
Thanks.
The one set out in the blog post in the second paragraph about FTDNA.
Oops. Never mind!
Hi Judy! Excellent summary – and so was your presentation on “Mothers, Daughters, Wives: Tracing Female Lines”.
However, the code/coupon for FTDNA FamilyFinder above doesn’t seem to work … Do you know if there is a restriction on it? I’ve asked FTDNA about it but no reply yet.
All I know is those were the codes on display at the the conference, and they’re supposed to be good until the 18th.
Thanks, we’ll just wait and try again later 🙂 !
Eva, there was a dropped code in the post so use what’s here now, please.
Maybe I need to do a lot more research, but what test would you recommend for a group just embarking on the DNA path? A lot of my family are interested, and I did my and my father’s on connectmydna :(, but I went to the familytree website and I am overwhelmed! Which of the twenty tests would be best?
I always recommend starting with an autosomal test for males or females (that’s the Family Finder test at Family Tree DNA).
I’d be more impressed if Tim Sullivan responded to my letter to him about the disparity in the messaging system between messages sent through the green button on the DNA match summary page and the brown button on the member profile page that may be a significant reason why testers aren’t getting responses to messages to their DNA matches.
There is much a blogger can do, but apparently getting Ancestry to fix its messaging system is beyond any of us… 🙂
Great site! I’m glad this came up in the Google results.
Any advice on which site might be better if you think you’re part native American/American Indian and want to know how much and/or what tribe?
Thanks 🙂
There is NO test, none at all, that can distinguish tribe. Any of the tests can detect Native American if it’s recent enough in your ancestry but not in the far distant past, and 23andMe is still regarded as the leader for detecting Native American at all.
I want to upload my 23 and ME to Family Tree. I don’t see a box to do this. I think mine is 3v. about 3-4 years ago.
Start on the Autosomal DNA Transfer page: https://www.familytreedna.com/autosomal-transfer
Forgot to mention Ancestry to upload, also
Living DNA sounds fine and I’ll probably try them since I’m all Irish/Scotch-Irish background and the Y + Mtdna can confirm my old 23&me. But I’m prepared to be disappointed that they will be able to show more regionalism with any quality. Their only location tool is their database and they haven’t claimed theirs is any better than the other guys’. Their I know that there was a recent large project in England to localize more DNA and a similar one, not yet finished, to do Ireland. Perhaps they have access to that. Perhaps that’s where they get their 21 regions in Britain & Ireland. Otherwise, who knows.
After all, I know now where my most recent 4 or 5 generations come from so I’m not sure what they can add. But it’s fun and i’m like you: can’t hurt to get more DNA.
I have included your blog in INTERESTING BLOGS or GENERAL INTEREST in FRIDAY FOSSICKING at
http://thatmomentintime-crissouli.blogspot.com.au/2017/02/friday-fossicking-24th-february-2016.html
Thank you, Chris