DNAprint Genomics (DNAG)

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Take a look at this. Dated 8/08:

In a study published last year, Mark Shriver and his team at Pennsylvania State University analyzed 10,000 genetic markers in nearly 300 people of Armenian, Jewish, Greek, Spanish, Basque, French, Italian, German, English, Irish, Polish, and Finnish descent. They found that genetic profiles differed from north to south and east to west. "Genetic displays seem to fit with geographic features of a map," says Shriver, who is also a consultant for DNAprint, a genetic-testing company in Sarasota, FL. For example, the Iberian Peninsula, isolated from the rest of Europe by the Pyrenees, seems to harbor a distinct genetic profile.And areas in the middle of Europe have a profile somewhere between that of the north and the south.

Two companies have already condensed those findings into commercial tests: DNAprint and 23andMe, a personal-genomics startup based in Mountain View, CA. DNAprint's European service uses a subset of 1,349 genetic variations from the original 10,000 to classify an individual's ancestry according to five groups: southeastern European, Iberian, Basque, continental European, and northeastern European. 23andMe, which offers ancestry analysis as part of a broader genetic screening service, estimates users' genetic similarity to 14 different populations around the world, including northern and southern Europeans.

Consumer ancestry testing, however, remains far from exact. All genetic ancestry tests are probabilistic: while individual markers might be more likely to appear in certain populations, that is not always the case, meaning that not everyone who carries that variation has ancestors in that group.

And the profile that a particular service spits out depends on the database used to calculate it. DNAprint offers a $240 global ancestry test, AncestryByDNA 2.5, that analyzes 176 markers derived mainly from studies of four groups: Native Americans, East Asians, West Africans, and Europeans. Because those groups have contributed most heavily to the current U.S. population, the test works best for people in the States.

Ann