I have been in contact with David Nicholson, the managing director of Living DNA, and he informed me that they are planning to launch regional projects for every European country (and potentially also beyond Europe) in the coming months. Their aim is to map the world's DNA in order to fight racism by showing how all humans are interconnected and how people may possess unexpected ancestry from distant regions at one point in history. Living DNA is the only company that offers a regional breakdown for ancestry within Great Britain (20 regions), and they have already started analysing regional data for Ireland and Germany. I believe that this is a great idea and I proposed to help them with the project.
I have already ranked Living DNA has the best ancestry DNA test because they are using more reference populations than any other companies. Yet for Europeans, the results may not be very informative at present justly because of their accuracy, as a Spanish person will get a score close to 100% Spanish, and a German would turn out mostly German too. But getting a regional breakdown changes everything. People will be able to know from which part of Spain or Germany they inherited the most ancestry - and that does not necessarily match exactly what paper genealogy says, because of the way DNA recombines at each generation, favouring some ancestral lines more than others. In a politically fragmented region like the Balkans it would be especially interesting to see how closely neighbouring populations match one another, and how people might have unexpected ancestry from a different ethnic group.
The first phase will be collecting 100 samples from each country (more for larger countries like Germany, France, Italy and Spain). People who have already tested their autosomal DNA with another company will be able to upload their raw data if all their grand-parents were born within an 80 km radius in the same European country. Anybody who qualifies for those criteria and hasn't tested yet, or wishes to re-test with Living DNA (to get a much more accurate Y-DNA assignation compared to, say, 23andMe or an FTDNA STR test), will be offered the same discount as for the Irish and German Projects (89€ instead of 159€).
New country project will start appearing one after the other very soon on the Living DNA's website. I will keep you informed here about further developments.
I have already ranked Living DNA has the best ancestry DNA test because they are using more reference populations than any other companies. Yet for Europeans, the results may not be very informative at present justly because of their accuracy, as a Spanish person will get a score close to 100% Spanish, and a German would turn out mostly German too. But getting a regional breakdown changes everything. People will be able to know from which part of Spain or Germany they inherited the most ancestry - and that does not necessarily match exactly what paper genealogy says, because of the way DNA recombines at each generation, favouring some ancestral lines more than others. In a politically fragmented region like the Balkans it would be especially interesting to see how closely neighbouring populations match one another, and how people might have unexpected ancestry from a different ethnic group.
The first phase will be collecting 100 samples from each country (more for larger countries like Germany, France, Italy and Spain). People who have already tested their autosomal DNA with another company will be able to upload their raw data if all their grand-parents were born within an 80 km radius in the same European country. Anybody who qualifies for those criteria and hasn't tested yet, or wishes to re-test with Living DNA (to get a much more accurate Y-DNA assignation compared to, say, 23andMe or an FTDNA STR test), will be offered the same discount as for the Irish and German Projects (89€ instead of 159€).
New country project will start appearing one after the other very soon on the Living DNA's website. I will keep you informed here about further developments.