Whose DNA is this?
I (f) just got back my DNA test from 23&me. I was thinking it was only going to be able to tell me what genetics I got from my mother’s side, but my hubby informed me it will tell me ALL my ancestry, but it will only be able to TRACE my mom’s side.
I suppose it’s like… “Well, you’ve got Finnish in you, but we aren’t sure precisely where it came from…”
Is he correct? And if it tells me where all my genes come from, why is it not listing any Native American at all (dad’s side. There are records and photographic evidence)
Or is it that I get both my parents genetic makeups, but it only reads the mitochondrial DNA from each? (I.e. I get Mom’s mom’s mom and onwards, and Dad’s mom’s mom and onwards, but no info from dad’s dad or mom’s dad except what they got and passed to me? So confused.)
Tl;dr
Whose genetic information am I, a woman, getting from my DNA test?
In: Biology
Everyone inherits their mitochondria from their mother. So the genes in the mitochondria were always inherited along the mother’s line: your mother, her mother, her mother …
Every man inherits his Y-chromosome from his father. So the genes in the Y were always inherited along the father’s line: your father, his father, his father … (or ~95% of them)
The rest of the chromosomes can cross over, so that children get a version of each chromosome from their parents that is some combination of the chromosome the parent got from the child’s grandfather and the one they got from the grandmother.
So most of your DNA reflects your heritage overall, but your mitochondrial DNA and your brother/father’s Y-chromosome DNA correspond to one person and their sisters (mito)/brothers (Y) in each generation. Also, mitochondrial DNA and the 95% of Y that doesn’t cross over only changes by accumulating mutations, not by crossing over. So these two kinds of DNA change much more slowly and are used in tracing human history- they have given us a lot of information about the migration of humans out of Africa to the rest of the world, for instance.
As for ancestry testing, that all depends on what 23andme has to compare your DNA to. I couldn’t find any details on their reference panel, but if you look at [Ancestry’s](https://support.ancestry.com/s/article/AncestryDNA-Reference-Panel) you see that they have about the same number of samples to represent Germanic Europe, Indigenous America North, and Indigenous America Columbia and Venezuela. Since it looks like 23andme puts all the Indigenous Americans together, it’s hard to imagine they have a better panel.
Latest Answers