Autosomal Marker Panels-opinions on Autosomal testing

[brian87]

I was considering ordering some Autosomal tests. I already have had testing done through FTDNA (y67- R1a1,mtdna-T2) so I considered just ordering there autosomal markers to avoid the hassle of sending of a new sample. It seems that FTDNA will run the markers but makes no claims as to what they mean.

If one orders the markers from FTDNA is there a simple program to interprete them ? Does FTDNA test as many Autosomal markers as expensive companies like decodeme and 23 and me? I would be willing to spend about 250 dollars but not a thousand.

Although I am of recent European background I wanted to see if some of my ancestors could be Jewish(Middle Eastern) as some of my closer mtDNA and ydna matches are. I'm also curious as to a general background as well.

Other companies seem to promise a lot but are they really better than just ordering the markers from FTDNA? Would it be effective to order the FTDNA Autosomal Marker Panels? Would one marker Panel be enough or should I order all three?

Thanks,
Brian

[Nagelfar]

Third party programs for autosomal STRs leave a lot to be desired in my opinion. I wish FTDNA would do autosomal SNP tests, but in my opinion, these autosomal STR tests FTDNA offers aren't worth it. Hopefully they'll offer SNP tests for autosomes sometime in the future.

[Noaide]

If one orders the markers from FTDNA is there a simple program to interprete them ? Does FTDNA test as many Autosomal markers as expensive companies like decodeme and 23 and me? I would be willing to spend about 250 dollars but not a thousand.

The FTDNA autosomal panels is not enough to find anything except very crude continental ancestry (European, Asian or African) and is totally useless in any admixture or minority analysis. So I suggest you wait until the expensive autosomal SNP tests prices comes down, you begin saving or you dont take the test.

[tomcat]

...
If one orders the markers from FTDNA is there a simple program to interprete them ? Does FTDNA test as many Autosomal markers as expensive companies like decodeme and 23 and me? I would be willing to spend about 250 dollars but not a thousand.

Although I am of recent European background I wanted to see if some of my ancestors could be Jewish(Middle Eastern) as some of my closer mtDNA and ydna matches are. I'm also curious as to a general background as well.

Other companies seem to promise a lot but are they really better than just ordering the markers from FTDNA? Would it be effective to order the FTDNA Autosomal Marker Panels? Would one marker Panel be enough or should I order all three?
...

An autosomal study of European-Americans, based on thousands of SNP's and released last year, purported to have isolated a profile characteristic of Ashkenazim, who theretofor had clustered with Southeast Europeans. Those results have not been commericalized as a retail test.

At present only DNATribes' Europa test claims to be able to discern resemblance to Ashkenazi. This is a profile matching or degree-of-fit analysis based on autosomal STR's, the same set of STR's as in FTDNA's Autosomal Panel 1&2.

Ancestry by DNA offers an admixture analysis based on thirteen hundred+ SNP's named Euro2 that claims to discern degree of Southeast European admixture.

There is a free Excel-based calculator called Omnipop that accepts autosomal STR data but in it's present iteration, 202, has only nine marker data for Jews, or just those of Autosomal Panel 1.

DeCodeMe tests a million SNP's and 23andMe some six hundred thousand and both offer degree-of-fit calculators but I don't know if Ashkenazi are among the populations to which one may compare.

If you have relatives willing to take a DNA test you might test your internal Y and Mt lines, such as your father's mother and mother's father, etc., to see how many of their haplotypes match to haplotypes associated with Jews.

[Nagelfar]

There is a free Excel-based calculator called Omnipop that accepts autosomal STR data but in it's present iteration, 202, has only nine marker data for Jews, or just those of Autosomal Panel 1.

There's also a ENFSI calculator somewhere online, but in my opinion, neither it nor OmniPop does a good job. There should just be a list of which allele values appear in what populations for the individual markers, and be straight with us so we can know what they're calculating.