Has anyone here ever gotten one of those home DNA tests?


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There should be no DNA originating from mom in the sperm before it enters the egg I'd have thought. It might be identical to DNA from mom's chromosomes, and it may be recombinated to form that but the only source of DNA in sperm should be daddy's genome, I'd have thought.
Nope you get a chromosome from mom and dad, and your sperm are a mixture, with chromosomes from mom or dad, hence there is sperm cells with one x and there are sperm cells with one y. The only chromosome where you can clearly see the difference. If we would label moms with a m and dad's with a d you can have chr6m or chr6d in a sperm and the same for chr1 to chr 22. However they are not pure m or d's because of homologues recombination during the making of the sperm/egg cells, called meiosis.

We have sex to mix up the chromosomes to stay ahead of pathogens that have much shorter generation times, but don't mix there genomes that much, at least according to the red queen theory. We need to run (evolutionary) to stay at the same place.

(Btw I think we need clearer names for mom and dad, and whose sperm and eggs were talking about, I think the mom and dad Im talking about would be grandma and grandpa in your reasoning :D )
 
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Looking up recombination more, it's sort of weird. So yeah, pairs of chromosomes can swap genes with each other, because they disassemble before going into sperm and egg, then reassemble after fertilization, meaning some pieces get mixed up. I guess you really do get DNA from all of your ancestors then.
 
I think I will actually get a home DNA test. Not one with traits or health though, just ancestry. I'll leave health to the doctors. Like I said, I'm already going in on the 19th to talk about CHEK2.

My only problem now is that it costs $99, and that's actually a hard bit of money for me to come by, since it would take more than one week to save up, and I rarely save anything from week to week. Maybe I can ask for it all at once. It's not that much, and I do still have stimulus money to spend.
 
Jesus, they want you to pay for them to take your DNA too? Athough to be fair, using a computer to search for similar genes in their database to recognise where your DNA has come from isn't free, but still nearly $100?
 
Still slightly worried about mutations other than CHEK2. Remember I posted that one paragraph I found that says that CHEK2*1100delC is a moderate risk mutation that doesn't explain a family history of cancer on its own? Just because my older sister is clear for BRCA1/2 doesn't mean I am. If our mom did have it, my sister would still only have a 50% chance of getting it. I didn't mention this before, but my other sister, the twin, has a thing in her chest that's currently not cancerous, but has to be monitored. Too bad she doesn't want genetic testing. Anyway, just gotta wait until the 19th...
 
I'm actually waffling on the ancestry test now. I wanna get the hereditary cancer screening out of the way first, and then maybe try to identify relatives on my mom's side. It wouldn't be quite worth it to warn them about CHEK2, but if I had another mutation too, I guess it would.
 
I was just thinking too, Facebook is probably better for identifying my mom's family than Ancestry is. Only one person has a record of my mom's nine siblings on Ancestry, and they're all set to private.
 
You know, I was looking through my mom's ancestry for something that might suggest bad genes, and I found something that could be a problem for one of my aunts, but not me. My aunt has both a second great grandmother named Hunold and a husband named Hunold. Hunold's also really not that common of a surname. Shoot, I wonder if I should try to tell her.

You know, the more I think about it though, I think someone might've mentioned to me that they already discovered this. Anyway, I just checked, and neither my aunt or her husband Hunold are on Facebook, so I wouldn't really know a good way to contact them.
 
You know, I was just thinking, I probably don't have to worry too much about recessive genes, because even though my mom is from a red state, my dad is from a blue state, meaning his blue state dominant genes should cancel out her red state recessive genes.

That said, the CHEK2 mutation my sister has is a dominant gene, just not one that kills early enough to write itself out of the human genome. :(

Edit: Well actually, I should correct that. A mutation is not a gene. It does only take mutation on one side to cause CHEK2 problems though. CHEK2 itself is actually a very good gene if not mutated, since it suppresses tumors.
 
I've been looking into CHEK2 more. My sister told me she didn't remember the name of the specific CHEK2 mutation she had, but I assumed it was 1100delC since that's the most common one. I'm still wondering about its origin. They say it's common in both Northern and Eastern Europe, but I think its origin is actually in Eastern Europe. I'm trying to make sure I don't have any close ancestry there, because Eastern Europe is associated with quite a lot of bad genetic variants.

I mean, the sensible thing to do is just wait until I see the doctor on the 19th about it, but my problem is that I don't have much to do in the meantime, and I hate just doing nothing to look into it.
 
You know, I have four ancestors on my mom's side listed as from Prussia. Two of them appear to be from the West German part of Prussia though. The other two don't have a specific place in Prussia listed though, so maybe they're from Prussia proper. That would be Eastern Europe technically, right? Of the other two, one was born in 1814, and the other in 1824. Any idea exactly where Prussia would've been at that time?
 
You know, I was looking up the last names of the two non-specific Prussians to try to determine their ethnicity, and as it turns out, the only Fichtenkorts are in America. Apparently, that guy was probably forced to change the first vowel in his last name by English speaking people when he came here. Stupid fucking English.
 
You know, Mrs. Fichtenkort was a Kratz. That one's so common, I'm not even going to try to pin it down. There are over 500 of them in Brazil, and I doubt I'm Brazilian.
 
It's weird, the 1860 US census had a column for race, but on the page with the Fichtenkorts, they were using that column for something else. Instead of putting W, B, or M, like they were supposed to, they just had check marks. I wonder if anyone knows what that column was being used for. The sample census page on Wikipedia's page for the 1860 US census also has nothing but check marks in the race column. There's probably some interesting factoid about that, but I'm too lazy to find it on my own.

Edit: I think I've figured it out. Looking at who has check marks and who doesn't, apparently they just used that column for whoever was born outside Iowa, at least in the Fichtenkorts' page's case.
 
Don't forget that in 1860 the civil war was just about to break out. Iowa was a firmly union state, so failing to record properly the skin colour of its residents might have been a political move of the time.
 
I'm still wondering exactly which CHEK2 variant my sister has. Like I said, I've been assuming 1100delC, but um, the highest frequencies of that in Northern Europe are in Finland, Denmark, and the Netherlands, apparently, and I don't see any of that on my mother's side. Mostly, she was a lot of German with a little Irish. I mean, 1100delC is in Germany too, I'm sure, but I'd like some more concrete connection to it. I guess I'll have to see if it really is 1100delC when I get tested. I gotta admit, I haven't really been looking into any of the other CHEK2 variants at all, since 1100delC is so dominant. I might try doing a search for "CHEK2 Germany".
 
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