In recent years, a whole bunch of Chinese DNA test companies have popped up promising more specific results than Western companies—down to which part of China your ancestors are from. But how accurate are they?
Consumer DNA tests have exploded in popularity in recent years, with an estimated 26 million people having taken tests from DNA kit providers.
Companies like Ancestry and 23andMe promise details such as where your ancestors came from and what hereditary diseases you’re likely to contract.
But for many people of East Asian background, the results from these Western-based companies can be unsatisfying.
When I took a test with Ancestry three years ago, the test showed I was 99% East Asian and 1% Pacific Islander. Another colleague who took a test with MyHeritage was told she was 94.4% Chinese and/or Vietnamese, 4% Japanese and/or Korean, and 1.6% Finnish.
The reason for these vague results is database limitations. Since many of these companies don’t have a whole lot of samples from East Asia, the results are not as specific as they might be for people of European descent.
That’s why in recent years, many Chinese DNA test companies have popped up to fill the gap. Companies like 23Mofang and WeGene are marketing their genetic tests to East Asian consumers—particularly those in China—who have historically been underrepresented in the databases of Western service providers.
These companies promise more specific results—down to which part of China your ancestors came from—based on their pool of Chinese people’s DNA.
These companies promise more specific results—down to which part of China your ancestors came from—based on their pool of Chinese people’s DNA.
But compared to the United States, China remains a fairly nascent market for direct-to-consumer genetic testing. 23Mofang has only tested about 500,000 out of China’s 1.4 billion population since 2015, while WeGene has tested about 300,000 since 2014.
By comparison, 23andMe has about 10 million clients.
(Read more: Eddie Huang and Wang Leehom went on a Chinese root-searching trip. Here’s what it was like.)
Where the Chinese companies lack in numbers, they claim to make up for in diversity. With databases consisting largely of East Asian and Chinese users, they are able to break down ethnicity even further into subgroups, determining whether a Chinese person is Northern or Southern Han, or part of minority ethnic groups such as Miao, Zhuang, or Dai.
“In China, people want to go a layer deeper and find out what ethnicity they are exactly.”
“In China, people want to go a layer deeper and find out what ethnicity they are exactly,” says Zhou Kun, co-founder and chief executive of 23Mofang. “It’s different from the United States, which is a country of immigrants where people want to find out which European countries their ancestors came from.”
For $60 and a saliva sample, 23Mofang can extract your DNA and then provide a comprehensive report that includes ancestral information, hereditary disease risks, and traits like alcohol tolerance level.
It’s a tantalizing promise. For $60 and a saliva sample, 23Mofang can extract your DNA and then provide a comprehensive report that includes ancestral information, hereditary disease risks, and traits like alcohol tolerance level.
They can even determine if you are a descendant of ancient Chinese royalty.
They can even determine if you are a descendant of ancient Chinese royalty, which Zhou says is important because people in China place more emphasis on retracing their family tree and how family surnames are passed on.
My test with 23Mofang yielded more specific results than Ancestry, including a breakdown of how much of my DNA was southern Han Chinese and how much came from China’s ethnic minorities.
(Read more: I went back to where I ‘came from’ and thought it would help me belong)
23Mofang also offers a variety of tests that purport to determine if you are more inclined to altruism, whether you work well under pressure, and even how your skin could be acne-prone.
But Zheng Chaogu, an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong, who specializes in neuroscience and genetics, cautions these tests should be taken with a grain of salt. Many of the scientific papers that have found correlations between a specific gene and traits—which helped form the basis of 23Mofang’s genetic testing results—are not conclusive studies.
On determining whether someone northern or southern Han, for example, 23Mofang based its conclusions on a study of 1,700 Chinese people from 26 provinces.
That study excluded large metropolises like Beijing and Shanghai because such cities tend to have a large number of immigrants from other regions.
“To get really good coverage, you may need millions of people to have what we call statistical power.”
“So for such studies, there are assumptions made, and you have to buy into those assumptions,” Zheng says. “The sampling of Chinese people is limited in the study, less than 2,000 people. To get really good coverage, you may need millions of people to have what we call statistical power to discern differences between north and south of China.”
And since companies don’t share the same database, you could get widely varying results.
23Mofang’s goal is to compile a database of 50 million people in the next five to six years, which might help improve the accuracy of results and lead to people seeing changes in their ancestry information.
But as demand for consumer genetic testing has grown in China, so have privacy concerns.
Since DNA essentially makes up a person’s biological identity, giving private companies that data in exchange for some interesting information about genetic traits is considered a massive trade-off.
“In exchange for your DNA they give you several hundred test results, but you won’t know if they’re testing your DNA for your entire genome or doing all kinds of association studies in the background,” Zheng says.
He urges people interested in genetic testing to first read the terms of service from the provider to ensure they know how their genetic information will be used.
“It’s like any sort of trade-off,” he says. “If you want to do the test to know what’s wrong with you or improve your life, part of your privacy has to be given up.”
