How does it work?

It all starts with the cells that can be recovered from your saliva sample, which contain your genetic information. Once your saliva sample is received in the laboratory, the first step in our analysis is to extract and isolate the DNA from your cells. These molecules are then amplified, that means we make many copies out of it; this process is important to ensure that the information we collect reaches the highest quality and quantity possible, free from any contamination. The DNA is placed on a glass slide, called a microarray, which has the DNA probes that correspond to the 700,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) on the Illumina GSA platform.

https://www.illumina.com/products/by-type/microarray-kits/infinium-global-screening.html

From this generated data, our team of bioinformatics experts analyzes the hundreds of thousands of variants using computational methods to detail the ancestral makeup of your genome.

Your information is contrasted against the microarray probes, which allows us to determine your genotype for each of these SNPs. This is the data that we ultimately use to determine your genetic ancestry and your uni parental lineages.

To calculate your ancestry percentages, we have assembled a different reference panels of genetic data from populations around the world, representing the diversity at a continental level & of course for the first time a regional level in Latin America.