Simple test reveals DNA percentages

CLEVELAND - Saturday is St. Patrick's Day, a celebration of ancestry. Theres a company based in Ohio that can show you where your DNA comes from. All you need are some cotton swabs and this envelope.

NewsChannel5 traveled to the Cincinnati area to visit the lab of the DNA Diagnostics Center. With its AncestrybyDNA test, the company can actually tell you your ethnic make-up down to the percentages.

Dr. Michael Baird is the chief science officer of the company.

The four broad ethnic groups we're looking at are European, Sub-Saharan African, East Asian, and Indigenous American," Baird said.

Indigenous American means Native American. So, how does the AncestrybyDNA test work? Baird said they look for whats called ancestry informative markers.

And these are markers in the DNA that have been around for 10,000 years or more. So we look at a battery of those and determine what percentage of those you have in your genome, and we can determine what your ethnicity is, Baird said.

"Desperate Housewives" actress Eva Longoria took a similar test on Dr. Henry Louis gates' PBS program called "Faces of America." She thought the test would show that she was mostly Native American.

But, her ethnic pie chart showed that she's 70 percent European, 27 percent Native American and three percent African.

Oprah Winfrey took a DNA ancestry test and it turns out that the queen of talk is 89 percent African, 8 percent Native American and 3 percent East Asian. On "The George Lopez Show," actor and comedian Larry David found out hes 63 percent European and 37 percent Native American.

Dr. Michael Baird was curious about his ancestry.

See the article here:
Simple test reveals DNA percentages

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