It's your prerogative to wait to be deep SNP tested until more SNPs are discovered, but the discovery process is going to go on for years. At what point do you dive in? And if everyone sits back and waits for that time, the hunt for new SNPs will end. If people don't get SNP tested along the way, there will be no money to do the research -- and no commercial incentive to do it. If you want commercial labs to keep looking for new, usable tests, you have to give them a reason to make the investment by taking the tests they develop. We went from 12 to 25 to 37 to 67 STR markers because genealogists were clamoring for more markers -- and obviously willing to pay for them. Your deep SNP testing only covers the SNPs that are known at the time you test. If more downstream SNPs are discovered later, you will be asked to pay for the individual tests as the SNPs are discovered. If you want to buy a "SNP annuity" that will guarantee they continue to test your sample for new SNPs, indefinitely, it will cost you much more to be tested. There's no harm in testing upstream SNPs, but there's typically no need to do it, and certainly no need to raise the price of SNP testing for everyone to do it for everyone. As I said, I think they were generous to give a test that was unnecessary, just to keep a customer happy. Diana > -----Original Message----- > From: y-dna-projects-bounces@rootsweb.com On Behalf Of dnalister@comcast.net > Sent: Tuesday, June 15, 2010 9:49 PM > To: y-dna-projects@rootsweb.com > Subject: Re: [Y-DNA-projects] R Deep Clade tests > > They seem to be willing to test a second SNP when they guess > right and get a downstream positive result on their first > try, but I think it might be good strategy to wait until a > SNP even further downstream is discovered, and then see if > they will test for that one. Since SNPs can occur at more > than one place in the tree, it's a good policy to at least > eventually end up with results for the most downstream SNP > known for a particular branch as well as one immediately > above it on the tree. > > Kirsten >