Make a combined DNA kit for yourself

Have you ever wanted to make a kit combining all your DNA tests at the different companies so as to get the most SNPs for comparisons? Well GEDmatch provides that for paid members. So of course I made one of these superkits for myself! I combined my LivingDNA with my V3 23andme and my current Ancestry kit. Now to investigate what I have gained from this.

The first thing I did was compare this new kit to my recent Ancestry kit. All looked fine. It has the expected small differences, many of which disappeared (including the black lines) when I checked the prevent hard breaks box on the form. The older 23andme kit comparison had more black spots and mismatches.

My next thought about my new superkit was that I might get a better comparison to cousins who tested more recently at 23andme but none of them have uploaded to GENESIS yet. So I checked how my comparison to an Ancestry tester, my second cousin once removed Jeanie, looked. The superkit gets the same result as my recent Ancestry kit. When I compared her to my 23andme kit and my Living DNA kit however, there were small differences.

Cousin Jeanie to my superkit on the left and to my Living DNA on the right (notice the lower SNP counts)

Louis Kessler has done a nice detailed post about creating a GENESIS superkit here: http://www.beholdgenealogy.com/blog/?p=2963

I am expecting that this superkit will get more accurate results. If I find more of interest from using it, I will let you all know.

A long time ago I tried the DNA fix tool from the Genetic Genealogy Tools site to combine my Dad’s kits but the resulting file would not successfully upload to GEDmatch. Still it was interesting to look at the differences.

There are a few other tools out there to combine kits on your own computer, as reported by a user in the Genetic Genealogy Tools group on Facebook. I have not tried them myself yet.

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15 thoughts on “Make a combined DNA kit for yourself

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    • You cannot download your kits from GEDmatch, even the superkit. Try one of the other programs if that is what you are looking for.

  1. I just got a very odd match on gedmatch kit # LA2006737 at 90cm . I used DNA Painter to find segment overlaps and then ran those kit numbers against this match. None match, even when both maternal and paternal are known on a segment.
    When I look at this match kit’s one-to-many, it has so many larger matches, I can’t see my match (I’m not on tier 1).
    It makes me wonder if this is a combined kit from from different people. Can you look at this? (Run it against your kit #. I just ran it with an unrelated friends kit and they match on 2 chromosomes!).

    • Peter,
      Interesting idea but not so easy to do since you don’t know which of the two alleles each parent gave you at that position. Much easier to test with a 2nd company and combine the kits.

  2. I tried to combine kits but it said I only had one but O have tested in 3 places.

    Also could you explain tagging in different colors, please. Is that different lines?

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