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Archiver > GENEALOGY-DNA > 2007-03 > 1173826617


From: Bonnie Schrack <>
Subject: Re: [DNA] OmniPop caution received from FamilyTreeDNA
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 18:56:57 -0400


Gary wrote:

>
> In response to my question to FTDNA 3/12/07 on Panel 1 and OmniPop

<snipped>

> I hope that FTDNA will do the OmniPop analysis for the customer in the
> future. Gary Fox
>
> I received the following from its President, Bennett Greenspan, who
> gave me
> permission to publish it to genealogy-dna.
> Bennett Greenspan
> "We are offering the Autosomal markers because we have been asked for
> them,
> to match against some CODIS markers I presume, but we are not very
> impressed
> with the database that OMNIPOP has and we feel that it can provide
> misleading
> information so we don’t have it interactive on our site (Yes I know it
> is much
> easier for you if we do that, but doing that provides some level of our
> official ‘stamp’ which I am not yet comfortable doing. We will be
> building an
> independent database for comparison purposes, and have already amassed
> several
> hundred samples but frankly that is nothing when you are talking about
> recombinant
> DNA."

I'm so glad that FTDNA has very wisely taken this position. I have been
saying ever since Omnipop became available that people should not take
it so seriously, and I have seen a number of people insist on believing
results that I frankly found way off base. From what I have seen, it has
had the effect of misleading people, since it has a very inadequate
database, as Bennett points out; the sample sizes are all different and
this skews the results, as Thomas explained to me; and people by pure
chance, drift, and convergence very often have matches with populations
across the globe with whom their families have never had any connection.
It is a flawed method, and I would be glad if people would not keep
putting their trust in it, as they have.

From what I saw at the Am. Soc. of Human Genetics meeting last fall,
there is a lot of research going on regarding autosomal markers for
ancestry testing, and considerable progress is being made, but the more
successful, advanced new tests are not being made available to the
consumer, and it will probably be some time until someone manages to put
this research into an applied, commercial setting. In the meantime, we
can test our autosomal markers and compare them to various databases,
but I don't believe Omnipop is the way to go, and I'm very glad to hear
that Bennett agrees.

Bonnie



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