Tag Archive | myheritage

The Reinvented 23andme

Jun20

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.

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New DNA Match List Features at MyHeritage

Nov23

MyHeritage has added labels (colored dots) and favorites (stars) to the DNA matches lists. These are extremely similar to the ones at AncestryDNA. One advantage at MyHeritage is that when you select multiple colored dots to display, you are shown all the matches marked with either one, whereas Ancestry only shows the matches who have both. Another advantage is that MyHeritage gives you 30 colors as opposed to the 24 at Ancestry.

On a DNA match, the left are icons for the new features, labels and favorites, above the new location of the notes icon (red arrow my addition). Clicking the square for a label slides in a panel on the right as above.

The downside of the MyHeritage implementation is that you can only see and edit these colored labels on the DNA match lists, not on the actual match page or its in common with list. According to the blog post that My Heritage wrote on how to use this feature (click here), those pages will have the labels in the future. Also when you export your match list from MyHeritage there is no indication of those labels in the resulting CSV.

So how might you use this new feature? First of all, for myself, I use the favorites star for matches I want to come back to later. However when working on an unknown parentage case, I use the star for just the paternal side which is helpful for various automated tools.

If you have already assigned colored dots on Ancestry, my advice is to use the same colors on your MyHeritage labels for the same groups. Personally I have assigned a color to each great-grandparent line, except my Bavarian line which has very few testers and no matches that I can confirm other than the one 2nd cousin that I convinced to test.

Then I have a few fifth grandparents who seem to have many tested descendants that match us, so they get colors too. Next I assigned colors for as yet undetermined matches from the same localities that my ancestors are from, those include labels for Norway unknown, Germany unknown, and Ashkenazi unknown. Click here for my discussion of how I use the very similar the Ancestry labels.

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Monday Presentation: MyHeritage’s Theory of Family Relativity

Nov22

MyHeritage has been producing a wonderful series of live presentations via their FaceBook page. At 11 a.m. Monday (tomorrow) California time I will be giving a talk on how to use the Theory of Family Relativity. If you come to this free lecture you might win a free DNA kit plus you can ask me DNA questions live.

Otherwise you can view it later by clicking on the videos tab on their page. I am amazed that my last video for them about finding cousins using DNA at MyHeritage had over 20K views!

One of the slides in my talk, slides are at https://slides.com/kittycooper/myheritagetofr

In other news from MyHeritage, this year they finally have the ability to give a gift membership in time for the holidays and they have already started their Black Friday sale.

UPDATE 23-Nov-2020: The video of my talk is now available on the MyHeritage FaceBook page here:https://www.facebook.com/6572227821/videos/150034700143856 and the image above is linked to the slides. Plus here is the Black Friday sales link: this limited-time offer ends November 27, and the price is $39, plus free shipping on 2+ kits if ordering from this link.

Visit with Me on MyHeritage Live this Wednesday

Jul27

Would you like to see me virtually, in person, and be able to ask me a question? I will talk about ‘Finding family with DNA at MyHeritage‘ on Wednesday July 29 at 11am PST (2pm EST) and then respond to queries. UPDATE: It is over but you can click here to view the video or click here for my slides https://slides.com/kittycooper/findingfamilydnamyh

I am very pleased to be a speaker in the MyHeritage Live series hosted on their FaceBook page at FaceBook.com/myheritage and hope to see some of you there. If you miss it, you can always watch it in the video section of that page later on. There are lots of great sessions available there from this series, check them out!

The Video Library on the MyHeritage FaceBook page

From the MyHeritage blog at https://blog.myheritage.com/2020/06/myheritage-online-events-for-june-july/

“You can participate in these sessions right from our Facebook page — no advanced registration required! Simply visit the Facebook page when the session is scheduled to start and look out for the live video broadcast at the top of the feed. You’ll be able to ask questions in the comments, and the speakers will respond to them live. “

UPDATE 28-JUL-2020: Once we are live I will post the link here and link this image to it also.

Why you might want to test for DNA health results at MyHeritage

Sep9

The live streaming from the MyHeritage conference in Amsterdam this past weekend was both informative and enjoyable. I was even able to watch without getting up in the middle of the night as they stayed available afterwards. Many of the talks included information that was not new to me, although I was pleased to finally be able to watch Leah Larkin’s WATO presentation.

Yaniv Erlich

The talk that impressed me the most was the one by Yaniv Erlich in the middle of day 2 about the DNA health results that MyHeritage is now providing (on a reduced price sale just through Tuesday, Sept 10). With the acquisition of Promethease and SNPedia they have greatly expanded their access to medical genetic knowledge. SNPedia is always my go to resource for looking up specific genes, for example click here to see what it says about the BRCA genes. While Promethease is where you can upload your raw DNA from wherever you tested to get health results (sadly written in formal medical talk) based on current but not always solid research (see comments below) and is linked to SNPedia.

One of the important take aways for me was that if MyHeritage finds a bad mutation in your test, they will use a different method, Sanger sequencing, to confirm the result! This almost completely eliminates false positives. Still if you are diagnosed with a really bad variation, my opinion is that you should double check even further by getting a doctor ordered test like the one from Color Genomics.

Yaniv also emphasized that they have worked hard to present the results in an understandable format. There are some examples of this on their blog (click here).

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