We got the results today to find...She is 100% European! That is right, they don't go into any more detail than the specific continent your ancestors are from. So after all that, I found out I married a white woman. I would have never guessed.
Well that kind of sucks.
If it matters to you, the 23andme service gives you significantly more detail than that. For example, I am also white but they told me that my gene markers suggest I am 40.1% northwestern European (broken down as 34.3 British and Irish, 13.6% French and German, 2.2% Scandanavian). Also similar breakdowns for the southwestern and eastern European percentages, and a basically meaningless breakdowns for the 0.2 African and 0.2% Asian and Native American in my genome.
For each of those categories, they give you the sections of each chromosome that correspond with the identification. So for example, my chromosome 9 is basically 100% British/Irish. The only segments of my genome identified as African are on chromosomes 5 and 10. They have a ton of information about how they make these identifications, including the sizes of the reference populations they use to make these determinations and maps that show you how strongly each identifier is associated with a particular geographic region. You can easily spend days reading about yourself, if you're interested. Some overview description of their methodology from their public website:
https://www.23andme.com/ancestry-composition-guide/They also give you some information about your maternal and paternal heritage, but this stuff is much more powerful if you have other people in your family also use their service. For example, they could tell me where my maternal and paternal haplogroups are from, which is basically where my paternal grandfather's paternal grandfather and my maternal grandmother's maternal grandmother are from. Because I have a female cousin who has used their service, I also know where my paternal grandmother is from, since her mom inherited my grandmother's haplogroup. But I have no genetic information about where my maternal grandfather is from, and I never will unless his son (my uncle) or his son's son (my cousin) signs up.
This stuff makes more sense with pictures, but basically you can only get reliable information about the origin of two different people in your ancestry, your father's unbroken line of sons and your mother's unbroken line of daughters. My only biological child is a daughter, so that paternal line ends with me unless my little brother ever has a son.
There's a ton more info in there related to your physical self. They can identify your hair color and eye color, for example, and a bunch of other random stuff like whether or not you appear to have the common mutations for things like lactose intolerance, a cleft chin, male pattern baldness, or freckles.
The controversial stuff, though, for which they got into legal trouble, was identifying which markers you have that published research has correlated with specific health problems, like breast cancer, alzheimers, and parkinsons. The FDA freaked when they learned that people were making health decisions for themselves based on their genetic makeup, without those genetic tests getting FDA approval as diagnostic tools.
They used to give everyone a risk percentage, in the context of the overall risk percentage, for each disease. So for example the average risk of prostate cancer in men is 17.8%, so if your markers suggest your personal risk is higher or lower than that, they would tell you your apparent risk percentage (the percentage of people with your genome who get prostate cancer) and the ratio of that percent to 17.8%, so you can see how much more/less likely than average you are. All of this was provided with relative confidence levels links to the peer-reviewed journal articles describing the correlations for each marker, for people who really wanted to dig into the details.
So for example, they're pretty certain I'm never going to develop a biological gluten intolerance. Celiac disease is well studied, it has well known genetic markers, and I don't have any of them. By contrast, they think there's a small chance that might have an elevated risk of male infertility, but the research isn't very conclusive on the correlations between the markers and actual infertility, and I don't have all the markers anyway. For the record, I don't have celiac disease and I'm not infertile.
The reason I got tested in the first place was that we were having a baby, and we have friends who inadvertently gave their children a crippling inherited genetic disorder because they had no idea they were both recessive carriers. 23andme is just one of many services that screen new parents, but this sort of testing is a relatively new thing. They check for things like cystic fibrosis, BRCA, phenylketonuria, and Tay-Sachs. That part, at least, I recommend for anyone considering reproducing.
