My cousin Corinne tantalized me by showing me some of the interesting new features at 23andme, so I bought the currently discounted upgrade and soon sent in a new vial of spit. As the email I got pointed out, my test used an older chip and more information is available on the newer one. Father’s Day is the last day for the current special.
Next I opted into the subscription for Premium Plus membership which provides clustering, historical matches, reconstructed ancestors, and many more matches as well as updated haplogroup information. One of the main things I wanted was the ability to get the exact segments where my relatives match me in a chromosome browser; a feature that had been turned off after the break-ins a while back. You cannot download all your segment data but you can view up to 5 relatives compared to yourself or someone else you match. You can get to that comparison by clicking on the blue “Compare with more relatives” at the bottom of the panel which shows your DNA chromosomes with shared DNA. Then at the bottom of the comparison page you can get the exact numbers.
The top of an example comparison page, my dad to multiple relatives. Notice that it indicates that he shares one fully identical segment with his nephew PG (on the X as shown below)
I have written many blog posts about using segment data (click here). I maintain a spreadsheet for all my dad’s segment matches and note where my brother or I have the same match, as well as other known relatives. Often I can tell what ancestral line a new match is on from their matching segment information. I have alot of updating to do now that this feature is back!
At the bottom of the images of chromosomes and segments there is the numerical data, which can be cut and pasted into a spreadsheet
You can also get to the attractive new clustering page from the relatives in common section of the match page as shown below. I have many blog posts about clustering (click here). An advantage of the 23andme implementation is that you can adjust the parameters. Probably I will need to play with it more and give it its own blog post.
Example of relatives in common buttons to cousin Elizabeth
One of the other new features that I was interested in was the comparison to ancient DNA, in other words to ancient bodies whose DNA has been sequenced. I was rewarded by discovering that I share a piece of DNA with Otzi the Iceman! Small but exciting.
However my strongest matches were to a victim of the Norwich, England, antisemitic riots of February 6, 1190 CE, A full 20 cM over 4 segments, while most of my ancient matches are one segment of 4-6 cM. These include several Vikings, a Hungarian noble, and some Goths. My next highest match was Erik the Red’s Brattahlid Villager VK179 (from a Greenland burial site) with 2 segments of 9cM. As I am half Norwegian and 25% Bavarian plus 25% Ashkenazi Jewish these all make sense.
Otzi was found in the South Tyrol at the border of Austria and Italy and now is kept in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology. In the museum you can see the mummy behind a barrier through a small window in the cooling cell. According to Wikipedia he is “the natural mummy of a man who lived between 3350 and 3105 BC. Ötzi’s remains were discovered on 19 September 1991, in the Ötztal Alps (hence the nickname “Ötzi”) at the Austria–Italy border. He is Europe’s oldest known natural human mummy, showing an unprecedented view of Chalcolithic (Copper Age) Europeans.” “Ötzi is called a wet mummy because it is not completely dried out. The Iceman’s tissues still contain moisture and when thawed, they are still elastic. There are not many wet mummies like Ötzi.” Even though my match with him is tiny, it sparked my interest in knowing more about him. He must be a relative of my Bavarian ancestors.
Reconstruction of Ötzi mummy as shown in Prehistory Museum of Quinson, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, France.. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
How to make money is an interesting problem for 23andme. The other big players in the personal DNA testing field all have many genealogical features to offer such as historical records and the ability to build family trees. Thus the ongoing subscriptions are a good source of income. 23andme has always been focused on health. People buy a DNA kit, look at the results, and move on. So how to monetize the results? Clearly offering an inexpensive subscription that gives significant extras is a plan. So let’s see if that works for them.
Kitty
5 Matches at a time Brower (copy the data; paste in a spreadsheet) means 1,000 iterations… we need a tool…
Good thing Triangulating DNA segments into groups (TGs) doesn’t require any genealogy. And the resulting TGs are your segments which are the same no matter the company – maybe integrating with MH TGs and some Matches with Trees (and Common Ancestors).
If you get into Clustering, please re-read my posts on Walking The Clusters Back – play with the upper and lower thresholds to settle into a general sweet spot for each relationship (2C to 8C) – AJ ancestry doesn’t Cluster well, but I’m curious about your other ancestors. Do the best cM thresholds shift with different ethnicities?
I have played with clustering on other sites and have managed to get results for my Jewish side by raising the minimum number fairly high(30/40/50). Once of my Norwegian lines is fairly endogamous also.
Maybe I am just confused.
I have tested using version 5 a few years ago, but that is the version we are being asked to update to, isn’t it?
But I see NO SEGMENTS. From what I have been able to see on the 23andMe website, because I live outside USA there is no subscription offer that will let me see any segment data. Others tell me they have made the same assessment. Apparently 23 appears to be restricting availability to people who sign up for health reports, which are only available in USA.
Yet the only offers I have had from 23 are for that health report option which they won’t sell me. They offer no way for me to see segments.
So to me, if they have refused custom, why are they complaining about a lack of customers? It seems a situation of their own making.
People ask me what they could get from testing at 23andMe, so they are obviously interested in finding some more match segments. I have to tell them they won’t be able to see any.
Fortunately for me, several possibly interesting matches have copied their DNA over to GEDmatch, so I can see them there. But most have deleted their 23 accounts.
23andMe options may be limited compared with other websites, but I found it useful for the segments and the matches in common (“SMs” etc.).
I would not even mind paying an occasional fee commensurate with that limited information available.
Well that is really sad news. You checked with customer support that this is not available outside of the USA?
This is available in Canada; I can see segments.
The Premium membership is only available in the US, Canada and the UK, according to the 23andMe ToS.
Kitty, thanks for the heads up regarding 23 and me and also the help with my MT dna. Ordered 23 dna kit on the last day of the sale. It will be interesting to see how their algorithm compares with My Heritage. MH just changed their algorithm and they got my paternal side right in that we are not German but Dutch via my dad’s Mennonite ancestry. The guys that run the Mennonite project in Canada have done a great job of locating the Dutch villages where my dad’s surname was located before they left for the Elbing part of Poland and later on to Ukraine.
I love the Cluster Relatives in Common feature on the match page. You can download the resulting cluster which gives you a grid so you can see how much dna each person in the cluster shares with every other person in the cluster. Using that with my Ancestry match list has already helped me with several segments that I previously could not get a handle on. While I would like to see some additional features like sorting the match list by amount shared with the tester or the match, I find their new features to be worth the cost.
Surprisingly, I found some clustered matches that shared a very small segment, less than 4cm, with me. I was surprised to see this small amount qualifying as a matched segment but in the two cases where I saw it, I was able to confirm the segment did align with the CA for that segment so I did consider them valid. Whether they are valid BD or BC, impossible to say.
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It is extremely annoying that a chomosome browser with matching segment data is no longer freely available to those loyal customers who bought a test years ago that included this feature in the price paid. We should not have to accept a reduction in service because of their past security failures.
Christine –
No company can promise all the original features will be available forever. Profitability matters. Making this feature “subscription only” makes sense for them as the small number of users who want it will pay for it.
The data breach was because users were using the same passwords on many sites which were breached elsewhere and sold on the dark web. The result was a list of those 23andme members who are jewish and a list of those who are chinese. These were available on the dark web but I have not heard of any fall out from that
See https://blog.kittycooper.com/2023/11/much-ado-about-dna-hacking/
@Christine Calder: I completely agree with you. Thank you for saying what needs to be said.
Kitty, many thanks for the update. Paid the money and my dna is being analyzed as of today. Maybe some good will come of the additional site. I have a new big puzzle that makes no sense. I have been teaching myself about X dna and how to use it. My brain is not as flexible as needed. lol
An X dna cousin and I have been working on our shared X (also with my sisters) and found another X cousin who is a female. She shares 28cm with me and 45cm with Dennis and 61cm with my youngest sister. What is weird is that she shares zero with my other sister. I have looked at her tree back 5 and 6 generations and find no common relatives. How is this even possible? There is some shared autosomal when I lower the threshold to 4 and 5. Are we looking at an NPE? Thanks Bill
Bill, because of the inheritance pattern of X even largish segments can last for hundreds of years, so an NPE is not that likely.
Here is my article about X which also refers to a few others
https://blog.kittycooper.com/2014/01/what-does-shared-x-dna-really-mean/
Plus here is how I traced a large X match in my family back to the 1700s
https://blog.kittycooper.com/2017/01/following-an-x-match-in-the-etne-farm-books/#more-4429