Error in the age of personal genomics

i-6f50481394aa2d1f18bd08118085b733-danielx.png

Over at Genetic Future Dr. Daniel MacArthur points out some errors in deCODE's interpretation services. Dr. MacArthur presumably knows his maternity, though if the X chromosome results were correct one would guess that Dr. MacArthur is actually adopted and that his mother might be a Lumbee Indian.

But it makes me wonder how confused people are going to be due to problems with false results. In particular, as these technologies become very cheap many families with make recourse to them. Sometimes this will highlight "extrapair paternity events," but sometimes there will be errors and siblings may face a period of uncertainty in relation to possibly discordant results. The likelihood of a false result creating an unexpected situation is conditional on various probabilities, the error rate of the results, and the likelihood of an extrapair paternity event (which varies from demographic to demographic and family to family). I guess we'll have more data in the near future....

More like this

Late last week I noted an intriguing offer by personal genomics company deCODEme: customers of rival genome scan provider 23andMe can now upload and analyse their 23andMe data through the deCODEme pipeline.  On the face of it that's a fairly surprising offer. As I noted in my previous post,…
Now that we've apparently elected Nate Silver the President of Science, this is some predictable grumbling about whether he's been overhyped. If you've somehow missed the whole thing, Jennifer Ouellette offers an excellent summary of the FiveThirtyEight saga, with lots of links, but the Inigo…
The odds of knowing your cousins: 23andme Part 1: Bizarrely, Jonathan Zittrain turns out to be my cousin -- which is odd because I have known him for some time and he is also very active in the online civil rights world. How we came to learn this will be the first of my postings on the future of…
I've discussed menopause as an adaptation and the grandmother effect before. I was also pleased to see the responses of Larry Moran's readers when he presented his standard anti-adaptationist line of argument. I don't want to retread familiar ground here, I'm not sure if menopause is an adaptation…

Raz,

Well DecodeMe seems to have been working with an older 23AndMe data set, so that's how they account for the error - which is now fixed.

In either case, I too uploaded my 23AndMe results to DecodeMe, and find that both my Autosomal and X Chromosome have:
1% African
5% East Asian

This is a welcome finding for me - as 23AndMe told me I was 100% European - when I have pigmentation results that suggest Uralic admixture, have ABO blood type B - common in Central Asia - and a family history going back to Lancashire, England to the exact area where the Romans settled 5,500 Alano-Sarmatians - who hailed from the Ukrainian/Hungarian plains, but originated further East.

I also welcome the 1% African, and have a very good idea where those genes express ;)

BTW, I have a section of "High Sharing", in the exact same spot on the X chromosome, with both Craig Venter and Kari Stefansson - though no high sharing with James Watson, the 3rd of the celebrity individuals listed by DecodeMe.

"Alano-Sarmatians": have you heard the theory that the Dragon Banner of Wales originates with these coves?

By bioIgnoramus (not verified) on 23 Dec 2009 #permalink