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Regarding Affy to Illumina move.
I recently saw post on rootsweb DNA e-mail list stating a person heard Affy made decision to exit genealogy related testing and thus forced FTDNA to change. First time I heard something like this and I'm not buying it.
Word I was given directly from Bennett Greenspand and Max Blankfeld stated the primary reason was related to error rate and miscalls for the Affy and I think something to that effect may have been stated in various places when the move was initially announced.
Meanwhile, found this article which provides interesting comparison on input material requirements and material costs.
Of course with only two commercial companies with any name recognition offering the microarray testing for genealogy, one on Illumina, and the the other choosing to change from Affy to Illumina, the decision with regard to "Affymatrix withdrawing from the market for genetic
genealogy testing" may have been made for them.
If you happen to google, you can also find some interesting articles on the lawsuits related to patent infringement between Illumina and Affymatrix which apparently have been going on since 2005 with a settlement in 2008, but subsequent suits resulting in Illumina's suit being dismissed in Dec 2010, but Affy's countersuit apparently still in motion.
Personally I speculate that FTDNA's primary driver is their pursuit of market share and database growth (the later of which they brag about for everything EXCEPT the autosomal DNA testing) and given their database deficiency compared to 23andMe and lack of compatability between Affy and Illumina, the only way they can feasibly narrow the gap was to make themselves compatible with their competitor so they can eventually offer an upload service at a nominal fee. Of course a decision to scrap Affy less than a year into production with most likely no return on investment, the cost comparison and future cost savings must have been considered before making their decision. Meanwhile, the free retesting (affy to illumina convesions) was also necessary so they can eliminate the duplicate cost of maintianing two platforms without having a total loss of trust from their client base. However, not sure they gave adequate consideration to SNP overlaps and potential differences in results when they made statement to effect that there would be no material difference between the two. So now, they have a little damage control and their official position will be focused on the quality issue and claim the new Illumina matches added are more likely "real" as compared to those lost from the Affy, so they will be saving you the time of trying to figure out connection for these "false" matches. I'm not sure I buy this spin, but that is the feedback I have been seeing
I recently saw post on rootsweb DNA e-mail list stating a person heard Affy made decision to exit genealogy related testing and thus forced FTDNA to change. First time I heard something like this and I'm not buying it.
Word I was given directly from Bennett Greenspand and Max Blankfeld stated the primary reason was related to error rate and miscalls for the Affy and I think something to that effect may have been stated in various places when the move was initially announced.
Meanwhile, found this article which provides interesting comparison on input material requirements and material costs.
Of course with only two commercial companies with any name recognition offering the microarray testing for genealogy, one on Illumina, and the the other choosing to change from Affy to Illumina, the decision with regard to "Affymatrix withdrawing from the market for genetic
genealogy testing" may have been made for them.
If you happen to google, you can also find some interesting articles on the lawsuits related to patent infringement between Illumina and Affymatrix which apparently have been going on since 2005 with a settlement in 2008, but subsequent suits resulting in Illumina's suit being dismissed in Dec 2010, but Affy's countersuit apparently still in motion.
Personally I speculate that FTDNA's primary driver is their pursuit of market share and database growth (the later of which they brag about for everything EXCEPT the autosomal DNA testing) and given their database deficiency compared to 23andMe and lack of compatability between Affy and Illumina, the only way they can feasibly narrow the gap was to make themselves compatible with their competitor so they can eventually offer an upload service at a nominal fee. Of course a decision to scrap Affy less than a year into production with most likely no return on investment, the cost comparison and future cost savings must have been considered before making their decision. Meanwhile, the free retesting (affy to illumina convesions) was also necessary so they can eliminate the duplicate cost of maintianing two platforms without having a total loss of trust from their client base. However, not sure they gave adequate consideration to SNP overlaps and potential differences in results when they made statement to effect that there would be no material difference between the two. So now, they have a little damage control and their official position will be focused on the quality issue and claim the new Illumina matches added are more likely "real" as compared to those lost from the Affy, so they will be saving you the time of trying to figure out connection for these "false" matches. I'm not sure I buy this spin, but that is the feedback I have been seeing
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