Sorry The EA below should have been IE. Nick. "Nicholas Penington" <[email protected]> 02/20/2004 11:00 AM Please respond to PRA-L To: [email protected] cc: Subject: Determining minority ancestry with DNA (not yet you can't) I was sent some newspaper clippings asking me my opinion about a certain DNA test called the DNAprint test. Since I run the Pennington DNA study which uses a very different type of test (that is a very good test) I thought I would share my reply with the list.. Ironically the Y chromosome test can give you a good indication if one's direct male line ancestor was Native American. Thanks for the newspaper clippings. I do know quite a bit about the DNAprint test but I think very little of it. I will explain why. Theoretically the test, if it used thousands of ancestry informative markers would be very interesting but it uses I think 75. They may have increased this to about 150, I am not sure. What the test can do is tell you that based on ones DNA one is likely to be 95% Indo-European (Caucasian or EA) and they may claim 5% lets say African American. Many people come back 100% EA. However the error is about 10-15% so that means the test is not accurate for the determination of minority racial ancestry. Personally I do not need a DNA test to tell me that my majority ancestry is Indo-European! Consequentially I think this particular test is worthless. Some Penningtons have rumors of Native American ancestry way back. I am afraid that the DNAprint test simply cannot pick this up with any certainty unless this was a grandparent. What is more the way this type of DNA is inherited means that a sibling may not even have inherited any of their grandparents "Native American" markers. ==== PRA Mailing List ==== ==== PENNINGTON RESEARCH ASSOCIATION ==== PRA publications are available at the PRA Web Site at http://www.penningtonresearch.org