My 23andMe Results

Last Christmas my parents bought me a 23andme DNA test. As I unwrapped the gift my step father, in classic dad joke fashion, looked me square in the eye and said “Luke, I’m not your father.” He then proceeded to laugh hysterically. I never particularly minded the bombardment of star wars jokes growing up, but if there ever was an appropriated time he definitely nailed it.

Anyways, I just received my results and thought it would be fun to share them here. 23andMe breaks their reports down into 3 major categories: Ancestry, Traits and Wellness. I won’t go through every detail they provided, but I’ll highlight the parts I found most interesting.

Ancestry

Perhaps the most interesting discovery was the amount of Neanderthal DNA variants I had. Most people with European ancestry have between 1 – 4% in their DNA and I seemed to fall on the higher end of that scale. In addition, I inherited the specific Neanderthal trait of having less back hair (can’t complain about this hehe). For those interested in how they determined the Neanderthal trait: marker rs4849721 near the EIN gene showed a change from a G to a T. It was a lot of fun looking at the raw data despite having an elementary understanding of genetics.

The ancestry reports also provided information about Haplogroups. In simplest terms, Haplogroups are maternal or paternal lineages that descend from a single common ancestor. Haplogroups help shed light on the origins of some of our ancient ancestors and on their migrations over tens of thousands of years.

My maternal line belongs to the Haplogroup K2a3.

My paternal line belongs to the Haplogroup R-M412

Wellness

The wellness reports show how your DNA may influence how you respond to certain lifestyle and environmental factors. I laughed out loud when I read I was likely to consume more caffeine and less likely a deep sleeper. Curse you DNA!

Traits

The Traits Reports explains how your DNA may influence your physical appearance, preferences, and physical responses. The predictions are based on current knowledge of how genetic factors influence our traits and the list above is just a portion of some of the traits they covered.

No big surprises here, but there’s certainly a lot of interesting statistics. My paternal lineage (father, fathers father, grandfathers father) all share blue eyes and my mom has hazel eyes, so it was interesting to see these percentages. I have blue eyes (or maybe greenish blue) and my sister has hazel eyes. As far as I can tell I inherited the majority percentage of traits.

Well that about wraps it up! Each report goes into a lot more detail and there’s still several reports I’m eager in dissecting further. Overall it was fun to learn a bit more about my ancestry and genetics. For all that are curious, I definitely recommend it!