Saturday, May 10, 2014

A Puerto Rican look at: FtDNA's myOrigins

FtDNA myOrigins [FtDNA Email]

Recently I received an email about the release of FtDNA's myOrigins; this would replace the old version of the calculations given for ancestry breakdowns. I was pretty excited about this upgrade because it would add another view of my ancestral breakdown by another company. Currently I have 23andme's Ancestry Compositon as well as Ancestry's AncestryDNA. I have also used DNATribes for myself and a couple of other family members. So let's take a look through a Puerto Rican lens of the myOrigins release!


23andme Ancestry Composition
For comparison's sake let's look at my 23andme Ancestry Composition. Here on the left is what my percentages look like in Standard View. I go back and forth between the Standard View and Speculative View, but for this comparison sake let's stick to the main one. You can see that in solid, raw numbers I am approximately: 54% European, 15% Sub-Saharan African, 12% East Asian/Native American, 1% Middle Eastern/North African, and 18% Unassigned. I don't like the large amount of unassigned here in Standard View but we can't live in a perfect genetic genealogical world (Not yet at least!).  

FtDNA myOrigins 
Now take a look at my recently released myOrigin percentages! There are definitely a few similarities and some differences. Here on myOrigins you can see that I am slightly more European at 58%, which is only a ~4% difference from my Ancestry Composition. My African is listed as 21%, a good ~6% higher than 23andme. The Native percentage called here "New World" is a solid 10%. Here on myOrigins there is a Jewish Diaspora breakdown where I score 7% and then a Middle Eastern group where I score 3%. On AncestryDNA I do score 5% on their category of "European Jewish" but 0% on their "Middle East". 

The categories can then be expanded to show a more in-depth look at the main category. For example, my European breaks down into: North Mediterranean Basin, European Coastal Islands, and European Costal Plains. My African breaks down into: Niger-Congo Genesis, and East-African Pastoralists. While my Middle Eastern breaks down into: North African Coastlands (Which if you look at it that way I score a 4% on AncestryDNA). Here are the pictures of the breakdowns for my main categories. Note: New World is Bering Expansion which covers North, Central, and South American while the Jewish Diaspora hovers/radiants over and near Poland. 

European Ethnic Makeup [FtDNA myOrigins]
African Ethnic Makeup [FtDNA myOrigins]
New World Ethnic Makeup [FtDNA myOrigins]
Jewish Diaspora Ethnic Makeup [FtDNA myOrigins]
Middle Eastern Ethnic Makeup [FtDNA myOrigins]

It was definitely interesting looking at these numbers especially at the African and European scores. My African on myOrigins is at 21% while on AncestryDNA it's at 23%, the highest 23andme places me is at 15.7%. Also AncestryDNA predicts that 12% of my DNA is from the Mali region and here on myOrigins 17% of it is labeled as "Niger-Congo Genesis". I was also surprised that I scored 24% on the European Coastal Islands portion and I wonder if that has anything to do with the potential connection through Gustave Jean-Charles and also potentially through my great grandfather's Irish/English paternal haplogroup. 

All in all, I didn't think the ethnic breakdown was too far of from what I have seen with other companies. Whether or not it's true to my family is a completely different story! Since my family is pretty mixed for the last past 200+ years I don't really know where certain parts of Native, European or African come from -- rather it's coming probably from all my lines. I can only guess that my 4th great grandmother was 100% African because she was born on a sugar plantation in Martinique. I'm really interested to see if myOrigins develops a bit further and adds more specific breakdowns for African like AncestryDNA has done. 

5 comments:

  1. Cool. Would you recommend one company over another?

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    1. Hey Diana, I really like 23andme the most, they were the first ones I tested with back in 2010 and overall I really like the different things you can do on the website. If I had to recommend one, I think it would definitely be 23andme!

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  2. Hello luis. I have similar results to you. I score 55% for europe, about 10 for east asia,about 10 for africa, about 10 for india, 7% for jewish diaspora and 4 for middle east o myorigins. I have more or less a similar breakdown on 23andme except no ashkenazi (jewish diaspora) but out of 23andme's 60 % european i have 45% unspecified so it could be hidden in there. I love 23 andme but i am very unhappy about the large amount of unspecified. Gedmatch is very close to myorigins for me. I am an admixt person from the french island of reunion in the indian ocean (mainly french, portuguese, indian and madagascar). Keep well. Eric.

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  3. I have similar problems with 23andme. I have almost 52% unspecified ancestry (~40% northern europe, ~12% europe anywhere), which was disappointing. I actually ordered the test to figure out which of my other results were more accurate (AncestryDNA vs FTDNA). Ancestry shows my trace regions as Iberian, Italy/Greece, and European Jewish. FTDNA shows a good amount of Southern Europe, no Jewish diaspora, but 4% middle eastern (Asia minor/Ottoman empire). As you can see 23andme provided me with no new information. :-\

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  4. Hi Luis, I do believe we are related. You can find me on myheritage.com and Gedmatch.com. I was googling Ashkenazi Puerto Rico and I clicked on your link. Your name is on my list of DNA matches. So we may or may not, but I figure I would let you know👌

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