Ancestry DNA New Chip
Ancestry Modifies Their Autosomal DNA Chip
Currently, Ancestry uses the standard Illumina chip also used by Family Tree DNA which also functions as the base chip for the 23andMe product as well. 23andMe has a chip customized for medical testing, and Ancestry is now following suit as well with their new chip, soon to go into production.
The Illumina chip today holds roughly 700,000 locations or SNPs that can be reported. Ancestry’s download today provides customers with roughly 682,000 locations, as compared to 23andMe’s 577,000 and Family Tree DNA’s roughly 690,000.
However, Ancestry is trading in some 300,000 of those SNPs currently on the standard chip and replacing them with new SNPs optimized for medical and ethnicity testing in addition to replacing some “low performing” locations with alternate locations. They couldn’t provide a breakdown in terms of percentages of how many are for medical, ethnicity or other SNPs.
What Does This Change Mean For You?
Today, nothing at all, according to Ancestry.
I asked if Ancestry had tested their clients who have tested on the new chip against the same client’s results from the current, soon to be, old chip – and Ancestry said they showed exactly the same matches.
So, the chip is backward compatible in that the new chip will still provide matches to the old chip.
The difference may come in the future when more people have tested on the new chip. Only time will tell if those people will receive more and better matching with other people that have tested on the new chip.
Ancestry indicated that if they feel their clients need to update their test at some point in the future, then they will put together a plan – but until then, if then, there’s nothing to worry about.
Should You Retest?
Obviously, the blogger’s group wondered about this. If you retest today, you’ll have to handle both tests separately in your account. There is currently no way to merge tests, so you’ll have an old one and a new one. There is no “best of both worlds.” There is no way to preserve stars or notes or anything you may have done to one account and transfer to a different account. About the only thing, you could do is, in time, to compare to see if you continue to have the same matches on both chips as more people test on the new chip.
Read more at DNAExplained.com