The "Big Y"

From: Michael Cooley <michael_at_newsummer.com>
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 22:39:25 -0700

One of the Benjamin Cooley clan is waiting on his Big Y results. I'll have
access. Some interesting things I've learned:

- The tester was able to order the product for only $500 as an upgrade.
(I'm not sure whether this was part of a special.)

- mtDNA results are included! How can that be? It turns out that as a
sample is worked all kinds of extraneous stuff is extracted, including
mtDNA. But because the test isn't targeted for mitochondrial DNA the
results are incomplete and unreliable. One the whole, however, it's
possible they will represent better than a ballpark sampling. Although a
haplogroup can be determined, its accuracy, however, will be in question
because one or more of the defining SNPs may be missing or misread.

- STRs are also sequenced!

Neither of the above is reported by FTDNA but are included in the raw data
file. (BAM files are a binary representation of SAM files, which I'll need
to learn to read.)

-Michael
Received on Fri Oct 24 2014 - 00:39:25 CDT