Categories: PersonalScience

I knew I had some alien blood in me :-)

Mary and I recently did the 23andme thing. I know it’s not as accurate as other methods but I still wanted to support the company in what they are trying to achieve and their contributions to genetics-based research. Also, it was Mary’s Xmas present so I had to do it 🙂

Well, the results are in. Nothing extraordinary, health-wise, so far from the analysis they did. However, I did find their ancestry composition analysis interesting.

Ancestry Composition tells you what percent of your DNA comes from each of 22 populations worldwide. The analysis includes DNA you received from all of your ancestors, on both sides of your family. The results reflect where your ancestors lived 500 years ago, before ocean-crossing ships and airplanes came on the scene.

source: 23andme.com

Sooooo…

No Greek genes in me 🙂 I checked the list of all 22 populations and Greek is not one of them. So ok.
But Italian more than Balkan? I bet it was those Romans.
Middle Eastern, ok I get that. My ancestors migrated from Pontus.
East Asian and Native American??? How did that happen? I bet I got the Native American gene when I got naturalized 🙂
And finally… 11.8% “unassigned”. I bet this represents my alien genes. I knew it!!!

Savas Parastatidis

Savas Parastatidis works at Amazon as a Sr. Principal Engineer in Alexa AI'. Previously, he worked at Microsoft where he co-founded Cortana and led the effort as the team's architect. While at Microsoft, Savas also worked on distributed data storage and high-performance data processing technologies. He was involved in various e-Science projects while at Microsoft Research where he also investigated technologies related to knowledge representation & reasoning. Savas also worked on language understanding technologies at Facebook. Prior to joining Microsoft, Savas was a Principal Research Associate at Newcastle University where he undertook research in the areas of distributed, service-oriented computing and e-Science. He was also the Chief Software Architect at the North-East Regional e-Science Centre where he oversaw the architecture and the application of Web Services technologies for a number of large research projects. Savas worked as a Senior Software Engineer for Hewlett Packard where he co-lead the R&D effort for the industry's Web Service transactions service and protocol. You can find out more about Savas at https://savas.me/about