23andMe's "Ancestry Painting"

23andMe has added a three-population (Europe/Asia/Africa) admixture analysis feature. According to a 23andMe employee, "[a] white paper with full details of our procedure [and plans to reduce statistical noise] is shortly to appear on the site for the motivated". Notably, 23andMe's scientific advisors include Jonathan Pritchard (of STRUCTURE fame) and Serafim Batzoglou.

It will be interesting to see how "Ancestry Painting" compares to deCODEme's current effort. David Faux has posted a compilation of deCODEme admixture results, and I am not impressed. Asian and African affiliations seem to be improbably high. I stand by my contentions that deCODEme is almost certainly already better than DNAprint/ABD, but evidently not good enough.

Update: Ann Turner posts a comparison of 23andMe and deCODEme
ancestry admixture graphs
(DOC). deCODEme reports the individual is 88% European, 7% East Asian, and 4% African, while 23andMe calculates 99% European and 1% Asian. Naturally, 23andMe's numbers seem more plausible.

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