Living DNA planning to launch regional projects for all Europe soon

Maciamo

Veteran member
Admin
Messages
9,948
Reaction score
3,228
Points
113
Location
Lothier
Ethnic group
Italo-celto-germanic
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.
 
Great stuff! Looking forward to it and would definitely love to contribute to the Albanian sample.

Keep us posted.
 
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 like them a lot so far. I've written them a couple of times and they've always responded promptly and cordially. Though they claimed they were only accepting participants with grandparents born with in 80 km of each other in Germany and former German territories, I wrote them about my father's background and how it would be interesting to include people who's grandparents were born in former Austrian-hungary as well and they then also accepted my father to the project. Really cool company who seems open to new things. I'll see how the testing goes but so far I can only claim good things about them, I like that they are working with Maciamo too. The other testing companies seem to becoming more and more garbage I hope that living DNA kind of pushes the barriers
 
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.

Maciamo, do you know if they will be re-categorizing the autosomal results of the people who have already been tested? For instance they claim 81 percent of my ancestry is from England when I have zero ancestors from England and other tests like AncestryDna have given me <1 percent British ancestry. I would be interested to see what regions my ancestors from Ireland, Germany, Netherlands and France etc came from, but I'm afraid that I won't be able to see it because they have miss-categorized me as something in between. It's quite silly to look at the regional analysis and see them claim that I have 9 percent ancestry from Devon and 3 percent from Lincolnshire and so on when I have no English ancestors.
 
Maciamo, do you know if they will be re-categorizing the autosomal results of the people who have already been tested? For instance they claim 81 percent of my ancestry is from England when I have zero ancestors from England and other tests like AncestryDna have given me <1 percent British ancestry. I would be interested to see what regions my ancestors from Ireland, Germany, Netherlands and France etc came from, but I'm afraid that I won't be able to see it because they have miss-categorized me as something in between. It's quite silly to look at the regional analysis and see them claim that I have 9 percent ancestry from Devon and 3 percent from Lincolnshire and so on when I have no English ancestors.

From what I understood, all customers' autosomal results will be updated regularly (at least once a year and maybe more this year) as new data from regional project becomes available.
 
Is it known when these regional maps will be available? The OP is already one year old. Thank you.
 
This will be interesting!!
 
The World is a pretty big place for a small group ideological experiment, never mind Europe.. My own experience with Living DNA is poor regarding my UK DNA results. It seems, they just misslead me into believing they are going to get up to ten generational data, but this was not true, and as I gave personal family genealogical information in order for them to do this, it is a concern and a disgrace, as they only used a few.

In my opinion only simple details must of been used for autosomal, and I feel a simple surname research would of produced a more accurate report for people from the UK. The geographical area's they use are completely missunderstood by them, and it is obvious that they have little real understanding of the historic geographical areas they use in report associating Uk Historical area of connections. It seems that whoever is detailing the mapping etc in the UK is not from the UK.

I feel completely disappointed and let down with Living DNA, It seems in my opinion, only an expensive market ploy to gain peoples DNA at their expense, and what they deliver is not what they advertise or what you believe you paid for. I am currently testing with another company as I cannot fully trust Living DNA. If they get involved in European,DNA and then attempt to map the worlds DNA I would be very worried.
 
Last edited:
(...) 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.
They promised a discont, but the discount to those who meet the conditions for the project was not 44% but was only... 11%. And now... they do not mention any discount.
I do not think they will succeed if this is the way they think will make the regional breakdown!
 

This thread has been viewed 8601 times.

Back
Top