DNA tests can be easily fooled and different tests may draw wildly different conclusions about the supposed heritage of participants. One thing the current rash of these startups have in common, however, is how their saliva testing kits are not supposed to come with spit already included.
Consumer DNA testing is going to the dogs. A Canadian testing company has been accused of sending back supposedly human ancestry results on a faux sample that actually came from a chihuahua named Snoopy, CBC News reported Wednesday. Remarkably, it’s the second company reported to have been fooled by doggy DNA in…
A test developed by scientists in the UK and US might someday be able to pinpoint the men most likely to get prostate cancer. A new study published Monday in Nature Genetics suggests the test can detect the one percent of men who are genetically most vulnerable to developing prostate cancer, a leading cause of cancer…
DNA testing site 23andMe is suing its biggest rival, Ancestry.com. In the suit, filed earlier this month in a California federal district court, 23andme accuses Ancestry.com of patent infringement and false advertising. Interestingly, 23andme is also pushing back against Ancestry.com’s trademark of the word…
The pitch was a skincare routine designed especially for me, genetically optimized to give me the skin I was “born to have.” The reality was decidedly more itchy, flaky, and red.
Liza Lizarraga has spent hours combing through paper and digital archives to track her family’s history the old-fashioned way, and she has spit in a test tube to find out what morsels of her family’s history might be revealed by her DNA. In September, though, Lizarraga will walk the same path as her ancestors when she…
I was crawling around on the floor, chasing my cat, Avalanche, as she artfully wriggled away from me over and over again to gnaw at the piece of tape I had stuck to her gray and white fur. Avalanche had unwittingly become a victim of journalistic inquiry: I wanted to explore the latest fad in consumer DNA testing,…
Dog may be man’s best friend, and even genetically similar to humans, to boot, but there are enough key differences that it shouldn’t be too hard to distinguish between human and doggie DNA.
When investigators revealed last week that a genealogy website had played a major role in catching alleged Golden State Killer Joseph James DeAngelo, a 72-year-old former police officer, some people worried what that meant for DNA privacy. The Golden State Killer terrorized California in the 1970s and 1980s, killing…
The identity of the Golden State Killer, a notorious serial killer who terrorized California in the 1970s and 1980s, evaded police for decades. The case went cold. Then, recently, investigators got a major break: A match for what seemed to be a close relative of the killer, uploaded onto a genealogy website.…
Investigators in California revealed Thursday that they were able to track down and arrest Joseph James DeAngelo, the suspected Golden State Killer, using genetic information provided to genealogical websites, creating new and troubling concerns about how personal data is handled by the services.
When you mail off a sample of your spit to find out about your ancestry, companies like 23andMe compare your DNA to other people around the world, seeing how closely your genes match the genes of people in, say, Norway, in order to deduce whether your ancestors might have been Norwegian, too.
India’s eighth largest state is seeking to build a blockchain-based DNA database of all 50 million of its citizens.
In a provocative opinion published Monday in STAT, 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki argues that home DNA test customers don’t need experts to help them interpret genetic health risk reports. Wojcicki compares her company’s health reports, which tell people whether they are at risk of developing certain diseases, to at-home…
It’s become a familiar story in the age of consumer DNA testing: A person spits into a test tube to learn more about their genetic heritage, and ends up finding out they have a parent or sibling they didn’t know existed. It can be hard to keep family secrets under wraps when all it takes to reveal them is $99 and a…
From its perch on the Baltic Sea, the tiny former Soviet nation of Estonia has become an unlikely leader in all things digital. Its government has already embraced blockchain, declared Internet access a basic human right, and embarked on a massive undertaking to become a “digital society” where everything from…
In 1986, a technique called “DNA fingerprinting” was used for the first time in a criminal investigation, when a geneticist named Alec Jeffreys realized that when DNA was extracted from cells and attached to photographic film, it developed as a sequence of bars that could uniquely identify someone. His accidental…
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has cleared 23andMe to sell directly to customers a DNA test for gene mutations linked to breast cancer, making it the first consumer DNA testing company to win the agency’s approval for a cancer risk screening.
Genealogy is an old hobby that has had a recent surge in popularity thanks to new technology. In addition to attics and archives, ancestry sleuths can now log on to popular websites like Ancestry.com and connect with millions of other to whom they may be genetically linked.
If you’ve ever taken an ancestry DNA test, you probably already know that the results aren’t exactly precise. Sometimes you wind up with completely different results than you expected. And different brands of DNA tests can beget entirely different results.
