You also share the partial genetic information of your relatives
How?
qaz@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Cevilia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
As I understand it, you only share half of your DNA with your parents and siblings, even less with more distant relatives, and it’s not easy to tell which bits of DNA come from where. Also the records are anonymised so it’s even harder to figure out which person you can infer information about.
RamenDame@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Well, for a geneticists it is „easy“. In this paper which is a little older they just look at the Y-Chromosome and the last name, something men share with their fathers, and public accessible data (at the time). The pedigree is resolvable. Link
Therefore it is important, that this data is access restricted. For this we have EGA
So using for profit services like MyHeritage is risky and stored on servers you might not want your data on.
Cevilia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Names are not included in the data set.
golli@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
As others have already answered, you share DNA with relatives. Anonymisation is certainly good, but I wonder how well it works with something so inherently personal.
Some areas are conserved quite well, so you can find inferre the degree of kinship quite well. Another aspect is that imo one of the dystopian uses of DNA is for health insurance. And for that you wouldn’t necessarily need to know whether someone has a certain gene or not. It would probably be good enough to work with probabilities, if you know someone else in the family has a certain gene.
But I am probably pessimistic here, because of course there is tremendous value for research here.
Cevilia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Fortunately, health insurance isn’t a concern because it’s not really a thing here in the UK.