So you decided to order one of those commercial DNA kits from Ancestry.com, MyHeritage, 23andMe, or Family Tree DNA and now you've gotten the results back. What does it all mean? You see a variety of confusing jargon such as nuDNA, atDNA, mtDNA, Y-DNA, X-DNA, chromosomes, autosomes, genes, mutations, SNPs, STRs, haplogroups, nucleotides, alleles and more and wonder what are they and why are they important? Well, I wondered the same thing and decided to force myself to learn about them by presenting two talks at the Philadelphia AFAOA conference in 2018. Since many of our members may be interested in this topic, I thought I would follow-up the talks with a series of articles, highlighting their content in the AFAOA newsletters with abbreviated versions to pique your interest, and on the website with the full versions to give more detail for those who are interested.
The DNA series is presented in 8 parts. Part 1 discusses the basic structure of cells, where DNA is found in the cells, and the structure of DNA itself to provide a better foundational understanding going forward. Part 2 discusses the actual testing procedures used by the commercial companies to determine your DNA results and how they determine the numbers they report to you. Parts 3-6 discuss the different types of DNA, their corresponding tests, and the information you can and cannot obtain from the tests. Part 7 gives a summary comparison of the different testing companies and Part 8 discusses how to upload your results to GEDmatch, an online service to compare autosomal DNA data files from the different testing companies, and search for additional cousin connections.
DNA Tutorial
About David R. Neithamer
David Neithamer grew up in St. Petersburg, Florida and graduated valedictorian from Lakewood High School in 1980. He attended Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, where he graduated Cum Laude with a B.S. degree in Chemistry in 1984. During this time at Rhodes he met and later married his college sweetheart, Elizabeth Martin (an Austin descendant). He then attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Organometallic Chemistry specializing in the early transition metals, after which he began working for the Dow Chemical Company in Midland, Michigan in their Central Research Labs in 1989. During his 29 year career with Dow, David worked on a variety project areas including homogeneous, slurry, and gas phase catalyst and co-catalyst development for polyethylene polymerization, homogeneous hydroformylation catalysis, Lewis acid catalyst development, renewable feedstocks catalysis, and led their high throughput catalysis lab for six years, retiring in 2018 as a Principle Research Scientist. In additional to his scientific career, David enjoyed his other passions coaching soccer and travel soccer teams for 17 years and using his research training to investigate his family genealogy. He became involved in AFAOA due to his wife Elizabeth, and her parents, long time active members Gay and Alice Austin Martin. Although scientifically trained, he did not understand much about the different types of DNA tests and what they could or could not tell you about your ancestry. Becoming self-taught in this area, he gave several talks at the 2018 AFAOA conference in Philadelphia on DNA. The eight DNA articles are a written summation of these talks.