With the explosion of Do-It-Yourself products available online, you might wonder if something as vital as a paternity or an ancestry test could be trusted to be performed by yourself at home. There are certainly plenty of products available: laboratories around the world offer testing services to hospitals, governments and businesses, many of whom sell DNA kits to consumers for a price between $50 and $150 – this does not include the cost of getting the genome analyzed and the results sent back. So, cost aside, can these at-home kits be trusted? And, if so, under which circumstances should they be used?
The fair answer is, DNA testing (or profiling), has come a long way since the 1980′s. The most common analysis performed in North America, called the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test, is used by the FBI and is able to provide results that are above 99% accurate for cases such as paternity testing. It works by comparing specific regions of one’s genetic profile (called loci) to the same region in another genome, and then using statistical analysis to conclude whether or not they share inheritance patterns. Most modern laboratories now have the technological know-how to accurately execute this test. When DNA is collected carefully and without contamination, which is certainly possible in a residential setting, home testing kits can offer a similarly high success rate.
The various types of testing available, such as maternity, sibling, avuncular (aunts, grandparents), and ancestry tests all carry separate statistical accuracy rates. For example, testing whether two people are siblings, who might share only one biological parent, will have a lower success rate than testing whether two individuals are identical twins.